SOURCE: “Splendor in the Gass,?” in The Nation, March 20, 1995, pp. 388, 390.

In the following review, Leonard offers favorable evaluation of The Tunnel, concluding that is “a splendid, daunting, loathsome novel.”

Your wife is fat. Your penis is tiny. Your children are sallow-faced louts. Your mistress dumped you because you have “a loathsome mind.” Your colleagues in the history department at a Midwestern university are charlatans and poltroons. Your “post-Bomb pre-Boom” students on the banks of the Wabash are either boring pests or sexual prey. The preface you are writing to your magnum opus, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany—“This is to introduce a work on death by one who's spent his life in a chair”—has turned into a night-shriek. And you are also digging a tunnel in your cellar. To escape from what? From marriage, mind and matter, as if they were concentration camps: “There is no...