SOURCE: “A Repulsively Lonely Man,” in New York Times Book Review, February 26, 1995, pp. 1, 17-8.

In the following review, Kelly provides summary analysis of The Tunnel, which he describes as “an infuriating and offensive masterpiece.”

If you want to go down into the self, you'd better go armed to the teeth. Paul Valéry says that somewhere, and it was what came to mind as I began reading The Tunnel, this huge and long-awaited novel by William H. Gass, the masterpiece, one must presume, of this 70-year-old American master.

A middle-aged professor of history at a Midwestern university takes to going down into the cellar of his big middle-class house, away from his unloved, undesired, unloving wife. He starts tunneling down through the floor and out beyond the foundations, lying on his fat belly and squirming past trowelfuls of clay and dirt and dust on his way out. He...