Hello and welcome back to our ongoing Tunnel Reader project. For the uninitiated, the contents of this newsletter are intended as a special, standalone issue of Dalkey Archive Press' storied magazine, the Review of Contemporary Fiction. Taking essays previously published in the RCF, and commissioning a series of new essays, The Tunnel Reader will serve as a companion volume that contextualizes the the 26 years of writing that went into the novel, the book’s initial publication in 1995, and its subsequent reissue in 2026.
There will be a limited-edition physical release of the Tunnel Reader, which can be ordered as a standalone publication, or as a bundle with the Dalkey Archive Press Essentials reissue of The Tunnel.
Tunnel Reader newsletters will arrive on a monthly basis. We encourage you to subscribe, if you have not already done so. The full list of contributors is nothing short of stellar—the identities of whom will be revealed approximately 48 hours before each newsletter is released.
Today's essay comes from translator, novelist, and musician, Max Lawton. If you're a regular Dalkey Archive Press reader, you might be familiar with his many translations of Vladimir Sorokin's works, including Dispatches from the District Committee, The Sugar Kremlin, and Their Four Hearts. Max is also the translator of Schattenfroh by Michael Lentz and Antonio Moresco's The Beginnings, forthcoming in March of this year.
In his essay "Guilt and Innocence in America," Lawton reflects on the America of William Gass's The Tunnel and the reality of the America we live in today. Alarmingly honest, Max writes, "You must have realized by now, dear reader, that, in 2026, we’re living in Kohler’s world." This essays reminds us that if there is ever a time to read The Tunnel, either for the first or the umpteenth time, it is now.
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Those who have recently joined us on our damnable dig may access the previous dispatches from this newsletter using the table of contents below:
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Finally, if you enjoy the work, we encourage you to support forward-thinking literature by pre-ordering The Tunnel and The Tunnel Reader.
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Until next time,
Dalkey Archive Press
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GUILT AND INNOCENCE IN AMERICA
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Something in The Tunnel is broken now… something that wasn’t before.
There is a fundamental opposition in the book: between William Gass’s beautiful, highly individualized style (punny as can be) and the aberrant historical Gestalt that eats the protagonist William Kohler alive as he sinks down into it.
Over the course of the 26 years it took Gass to write his behemoth, ostensibly from ‘69 to ‘95, the notion of an American Nazi was something of a fanciful one—a personal quirk. Or a rarity at the very least.
OK, yes, I admit that Gass uses the conceit of this spite-filled, lonely man looking for a subterranean escape as a means of interrogating American authoritarianism in its arguably inchoate form, but there is a symmetry between the way Gass allows Kohler to express himself in such highly refined English prose and the fact that this man, so comfortable with his immersion in fascism and Nazi Germany, was not, at the time, a dime-a-dozen…
Gass allows Kohler his subjectivity. His individualism. He embellishes it, even. The guy’s fascism does not diminish him as a voice that we accompany for hours and hours and hours of reading. He is allowed his erudition, conferred unto him by his writer-god like a Michelin-starred meal ticket. We (the readers) are allowed to sympathize with him. We are allowed to see him as an INDIVIDUAL FASCIST or, to put it more aptly, a pathogen that has not yet “gone viral” (in both the biological and contemporary senses of the term).
Because, again, to allow oneself such earnest immersion in and allegiance to Nazi Germany during those years of American life was not so common and could well have been seen as, “y’know, chalk it up to he’s an odd fella…”
The tunnel Kohler attempts to dig, then, the tunnel of the book’s title, is a further representation of the fact that his eccentricity necessitates flight—from wife, from American life, from an external world that has not yet assumed the form of the fully fascistic.
You have to understand this, dear reader—reader, most especially, of an age younger than mine. Kohler flees into his tunnel because he is a coward, but also because he has not succeeded in making the whole of American life conform to his image. Or because it is not the whole of American life that has made him into what he is.
You must have realized by now, dear reader, that, in 2026, we’re living in Kohler’s world. Even though, if our world were a book, it couldn’t be said to read 1% as exquisitely as The Tunnel does.
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Another way to think about it: you walk past the site of Hitler’s bunker in Berlin by accident. A non-descript area of Mitte. There’s a bubble-tea joint kitty-corner to it, across the parking lot that now covers over the wreckage where the accursed Adolf breathed his last, skull detonated against wall by way of Nazi pistol. They (the German gov) don’t really want tourists here, but they most especially don’t want Neo-Nazis coming to pay homage to their favorite fucker’s death by way of flowers, dog-eared copies of Mein Kampf, and Christ knows what else…
There’s an occult configuration of apartment buildings around the parking lot. It’s an early-spring day, so your environs feel wind-swept, but the whole configuration of high rises around you also feels like you might describe it as perpetually windswept—something to do with the bareness of the tree branches… An Italian woman walks past. How do you know she’s Italian? You just know she’s Italian. Burberry jacket and Burberry scarf (these are not how you know she’s Italian). Somewhat tasteless, the combination of both, especially the obvious iconic pattern on the scarf.
All the same, you want to tell her: “You’re the kind of beautiful Italian woman one catches a glimpse of on the train or passing by on the street… And when one catches sight of you, one gets to thinking… Like, ‘this is a whole other life, a gnostic form of life, a beautiful life, an old-world life—it’s passing me by and it will never be mine and it is (she is) radiant, beautiful…’”
You don’t say it of course, but you think it.
Her apparition is also a kind of tunnel—to wish to tunnel down into another you.
But don’t forget this is the site of Hitler’s bunker. You couldn’t say anything to get her attention here, couldn’t curry favor with her in a zone so bereft of sex appeal. In a zone where the very notion of sex appeal is practically obscene. There’s a mob of Japanese tourists around the small and unremarkable sign commemorating the history that happened here, a couple of dubious guys with shaved heads in the distance too, they’re closer to the actual entrances to the apartment buildings, hanging back, afraid of cops catching their scent.
The Italian woman goes past, you look away from her as she does. You would hate to be a creep, would hate to be a Kohler, you’re not going to say an uncomfortable hello to a woman on the street next to Hitler’s bunker—are you fucking insane…
Within you also exists another kind of dream… Could you not tunnel away from Berlin with its right-minded adherence to what, at its best, is a more mature 21st century…? its multi-ethnic food culture, rent-controlled apartments, and politically progressive prostitutes, legally plying their trade without pimps, advertising themselves with miniature photographs pasted up in bar bathrooms not so much by way of bosoms as unshaven armpits… could Kohler (me) or I (Kohler) not tunnel away from that beautiful Italian woman who terrified us with another form of escape (never mind the fact she’s already left us in the dust, off to meet friends in Charlottenburg)…? could we not tunnel away from this multi-cultural mini-metropolis and somehow warp and woof our way through the earth’s inner magma until we reach America?
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To wit, my friend, America today is what lies at the end of Kohler’s tunnel… America then (when Gass was writing the book) was Kohler’s point of departure and America today is his point of arrival.
So, let’s get going! Let’s get down into that tunnel, Bill!
Our pilgrimage through the tunnel is a long one. In fact, it lasts precisely as long as Kohler’s novel—as Gass’s novel—does. I hate Kohler by the end of our trek, but I can’t stop listening to the dulcet tones of his honeyed voice…
Many months later, smelling like death and our clothes mere tatters, we emerge into a gymnasium. There is a bank of televisions before us. On almost all of them, masked immigration-enforcement officers run wild on the streets of America in startling HD.
One of those masked secret police is in the cardio room of the gym with us. He has a Marvel T-shirt and a belly bulge. He tells Kohler and me to each find a machine that suits us. You know how much Kohler writes about sitting in that chair of his, so I’m not sure any of these exercise machines will be much to his liking. I get him set up on the treadmill. He can walk at 4mph—no incline. I’ll do the same out of a spirit of misplaced camaraderie. If he goes slow, I go slow.
He’s particularly entranced by Laura Ingraham when her show starts on the TV nearest to him—on all the other TVs too. “The PdP… the PdP…” he mutters to himself incessantly. “This dreadful blonde is the PdP…”
Kohler’s paunchy form is drenched in sweat within five minutes and I cannot help but lambast him given how raptly (rapturously) he is listening to Laura:
“Yes, you bitch,” I say. “Here it is: your Party of Disappointed People. They’ve won. And sucked us all down with them. Sucked us down to the end of your fucking tunnel. Only they can’t speak or write like you can. And they seem rather more self-satisfied than disappointed these days… Your creator (the Great Gass) would be horrified by the way they express themselves. By the poverty of their thought. Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany… that’s your big book, isn’t it? Forget that noise. Try your hand at Guilt and Innocence in Trump’s America… and fuck all those fancy-ass writers you use to whitewash your fascism, to whitewash your obsessive delusions, to whitewash your misogyny… to whitewash the authoritarian tendency that is the very fount of your personality. Yes, Kohler, fuck Rilke—he’s gone, he’s got nothing to do with you now. He’s got nothing to do with this now. I want you to write your book again, Kohler… from the top… da capo… I want to read your Guilt and Innocence in Trump’s America… I don’t care if it takes another 26 years… the 26 years it took Gass to write The Tunnel… But your prose had better be dogshit, an idiom that suits our McDonald’s-ass banana-republic Fourth Reich… You too, Gass… tone down the elegance, the exquisite word games… assonance, consonance… I want you to write like shit this time. I’m sorry, man, but this is your tunnel now: the bank of TVs beaming Laura Ingraham’s face straight into our skulls… We live all the way at the end of the tunnel. There’s no light. And we don’t know what lies on the other side of the diaphanous membrane that separates us from it…”
Something in The Tunnel is broken now… I mean it… something is broken that wasn’t before…
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MDL, Halloween Night 2025, LA
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Max Lawton is a translator, novelist, and musician. He received his BA in Russian Literature and Culture from Columbia University and his MPhil from Queen's College, Oxford, where he wrote a dissertation comparing Céline and Dostoevsky. He has translated many books by Vladimir Sorokin. Max is also the author of two novels currently awaiting publication and is writing his doctoral dissertation on phenomenology and the twentieth-century novel at Columbia University, where he also teaches Russian. He is a member of four noise-music ensembles.
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