The Tunnel is William H. Gass

William H. Gass

William Howard Gass is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and former philosophy professor. He has written two novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven volumes of essays, three of which have won National Book Critics Circle Award...

's 1995 magnum opus that took 26 years to write and earned him the American Book Award

American Book Award

The American Book Award was established in 1978 by the Before Columbus Foundation. It seeks to recognize outstanding literary achievement by contemporary American authors, without restriction to race, sex, ethnic background, or genre...

 of 1996. It was also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award.

The Tunnel is the work of William Frederick Kohler, a professor

Professor

A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...

 of history

History

History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented. Scholars who write about history are called historians...

 in an unnamed university in the American Midwest

Midwestern United States

The Midwestern United States is one of the four U.S. geographic regions defined by the United States Census Bureau, providing an official definition of the American Midwest....

. Kohler's introduction to his major work on World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany, the culmination of his years studying the aspects of the Nazi regime in the scope of its causes and effects, turns into The Tunnel, a brutally honest and subjective depiction of his own life and history and the opposite of the well-argued, researched and objective book he has just completed. When the harsh reality of his work begins to dawn on him, he fears that his wife will stumble onto his papers and read his most personal (and cruel) descriptions of his and their life. Because of this fear, he hides the pages of his introduction in places where he knows they will not be discovered and at the same time starts to dig a tunnel outward from the basement of his home.

Critical reception

Some critics have harshly decried the novel, for instance Robert Alter

Robert Alter

Robert Bernard Alter is an American professor of Hebrew language and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967.-Biography:...

 in his review of the book in The New Republic

The New Republic

The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...

,

"Some may seize on it as a postmodern masterpiece, but it is a bloated monster of a book. (...) The bloat is a consequence of sheer adipose verbosity and an unremitting condition of moral and intellectual flatulence. (.....) The abjection of (Gass') hero seems less lived than written. It is an act of ventriloquism: behind the repulsive, potentially fascist narrator stands his critic, the novelist, presumably committed to humane, democratic values. But those values are nowhere intimated in the book, and what emerges is a kind of inadvertent complicity between author and protagonist. The supposedly critical novel becomes an enactment of bad faith."

However, other critics commended the work. In his review of the novel in the New York Times Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt is an American journalist, critic and novelist who has worked in the field of books all of his professional career. He began as an editor for various New York City publishing houses, among them Holt, Rinehart and Winston and The Dial Press, from where he moved in 1965 to...

wrote:

"So why, given the considerable grimness of The Tunnel, does the reader still track its endless coils of prose? For the lyrical set pieces, for one thing; the haunting evocations of a small-town childhood so sensually rich in detail that the prose is sometimes hypnotic. But more compelling still is the tension Mr. Gass has created between literary art for its own sake and transcendent psychological truth."

A third opinion is raised by Robert Kelly, who writes in the New York Times Book Review that "It will be years before we know what to make of it."