SOURCE: “A Small Apartment in Hell,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 19, 1995, pp. 1, 12-3.

In the following review, Silverblatt offers high praise for The Tunnel.

The Tunnel is the most beautiful, most complex, most disturbing novel to be published in my lifetime. It took nearly 30 years to write, including long periods of silence and the author's repeated decisions to abandon the work; but some of us have been peeping over William Gass' shoulder, reading sections as they appeared in literary magazines beginning in 1969 when a chapter called “We Have Not Lived the Right Life” appeared in the New American Review.

That piece took my breath away. The narrator, William Kohler, a professor of modern German history and specialist in the Third Reich, told us about the Midwestern town where he was born, called Grand (“simply Grand”). The beleaguered town is visited by dust storms and swarms of...