SOURCE: “Journey into the Dark,” in New York Review of Books, July 13, 1995, pp. 8-10.

In the following review, Menand provides a summary of The Tunnel and discusses the novel's problematic espousal of bigotry, hate, and amorality. According to Menand, the many biographic parallels between author and protagonist, as well as Gass's resistance to conventional forms of fictional distancing, make it difficult to separate Gass's own ideas from those of his reprehensible character, Kohler.

The Tunnel is about a man who undertakes to establish an identity between the frustrations and disappointments of ordinary domestic life and the Holocaust. The man is a professor of history at a university in the American Midwest. The frustrations and disappointments are his own—The Tunnel is, in effect, his memoir—and they are of a fairly mundane sort: an alcoholic mother, a sexually stagnant marriage, a failed love affair, uninteresting children, dim students...