The Tunnel by William H. Gass

 

The Tunnel by William H Gass, a maximal novel that is ideally to be read and listened to via Gass himself narrating the text now available as an audiobook. Why am I saying this? Gass was a fierce proponent that a work of fiction ideally should be spoken, tasted, and heard rather than simply scanned with the eyes. Listening to Gass's precise, rhythmic Midwestern cadence accentuates the inherent musicality, metric variety, and dark poetry of the novel that can otherwise strike a reader as intimidatingly dense on the printed page.

Yet having the Dalkey edition of The Tunnel is also a necessary and vital part of appreciating the full force of the novel's literary and aesthetic dimensions. The reason is clear: The Tunnel relies deeply on layout, varying fonts, and visual formatting of the text, sharing common ground with concrete poetry. Additionally, there's something about Gass's extraordinary use of language, the magic of a master wordsmith, that is missed if one only listens to the audiobook.

So, why do some readers and critics pass harsh judgement on The Tunnel? It has everything to do with narrator and subject matter. The first-person narrator, William Frederick Kohler, is a fifty-something American historian, a Nazi sympathizer, bigot, black bile stinker, and grousing smellfungus with his mind and fat, misshapen blob of a body rotting in his chair at his writing desk, an odious louse overflowing with hatred and resentment. As for the subject matter, Kohler distills historical, diabolical Nazism and turns it into a deadly poison soaking and drowning his neighbors, his family, and himself in the novel's 652 pages.

I will have much more to write about when I finish reading and listening to the entire work, an undertaking that will require months to accomplish.