The Tunnel

"The masterpiece . . . of this 70-year-old American master. . . . The Tunnel is maddening, enthralling, appalling, coarse, romantic, sprawling, bawling. . . . The rhythmic pressure of its language is seductive and bears along ever-interesting images and ideas. So much stuff in lis novel! ... We revel in the sheer glory of Mr. Gass's phenomenal prose style, his unflagging energy, in a prose that seems to embrace and swallow everything and make all things live with interest."—Robert Kelly, New York Times Book Review

“Gass allows his narrator to make a world within words, for the concerns of this novel's prose re both poetic and encyclopedic. . . . Gass's prose is as musical and inventive as ever."—Philip Graham, Chicago Tribune

“Each paragraph, each sentence, every clause, every phrase, has been burnished breathless, willfully wrought, stippled stark, with an obsessiveness bordering on Brodskey baroque. The eye can't rest, nor the mind mist. . . . Gass has written a splendid, daunting, loathsome novel."—John Leonard, Nation