SOURCE: A review of The Tunnel, in Sewanee Review, Vol. CV, No. 4, Fall, 1997, pp. cxx-cxxii.

In the following review, Haynes offers positive assessment of The Tunnel.

To The Tunnel William H. Gass has brought Flaubert's ambition to write a book with no subject, a book that would be held together by the strength of its style alone, to creating a book on the Holocaust. Or rather a book on a book on the Holocaust: the protagonist William Kohler, a middle-aged professor of history in a midwestern university, has just finished a large work on Hitler's Germany. Surreptitiously he now writes these pages, a mixture of embittered personal history and of angry and ironic philosophic reflection. We learn about his childhood humiliations under a bullying father and self-destructive mother, his infatuation with an aesthetic philosophy of history while a student in Weimar Germany, the erosions and degradations of his...