BIG BOOKS: AN AMERICAN STORY
by John Darnielle
Americans like big books, with reservations, because Americans have lots of reservations. Americans like a big book when it tells a good story that covers a lot of chronological ground: these they call “epics” when the books are big enough and span several generations’ worth of time. John Jakes trafficked almost exclusively in this fare, and he sold hundreds of millions of books to Americans who couldn’t wait to compare them to their successful adaptations for television, that most American medium.
Americans also like a big book when it’s daring in this way, or in that way, but not usually in more way ways than those. Pynchon sells books, though not so many as David Foster Wallace; House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski enjoys a long afterlife on store and library shelves nationwide. Bolaño had to die first, but Americans were happy to take note of him for leaving behind 2666, a big book if ever there was one. A big book tells Americans that an author is thinking big, and, moreover, gives them something to think about its author. William T. Vollman, one of our most rigorous thinkers, has spent his life refining his ideas about humanity and in particular about Americans, but has also, in so doing, succeeded in pushing boundaries of bigness so far that his biggest book, Imperial, can only be read by the 3,500 people lucky enough to have a copy of the unabridged edition: and so his books get reviews and even, deservingly, win an award or two, but few American reviewers of his work fail to lead without mentioning that his books are quite big.
But Americans did not rush to enter The Tunnel when it was finally printed by Knopf in 1995, after many of years of looming publication. It was met, on the one side, with expressions of admiration, respect, interest: those who approved, yes, the very word one might use when signing off on a project about which one hoped never to hear again—and, on the other, by somewhat dramatic white flags of defeat. “It will be years before we know what to make of it,” wrote Robert Kelly in The New York Times. Robert Alter’s memorable pan, in The New Republic, bewails Gass’s book-long insistence that fascism lives in the human heart and that its emergence into human history is a function of this physiological phenomenon, and that this aspect of humanity emerges crudely, hideously, profanely, and in mundanities. Alter contrasts Gass unfavorably with a writer he considers possessed of greater moral clarity, the French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline, who published more than a thousand pages of virulently antisemitic pamphlets in his lifetime. Alter considers Céline’s narrators more “authentic” than Gass’s William Kohler, who diagrams his farts. I suppose he has a point: Céline’s works are the works of an antisemite. They show us how the antisemite wishes to present his face to the world. The Tunnel, by contrast, shows us that figure’s actual face, for hundreds of pages on end and without mercy, and without the makeup most fascists put on before going out among the public. Its admirers were many, rightly enthralled by the barrelhouse music of Gass’s prose—sentences in which no word goes unpunished, no phrase is free enough to flee the infamy of its object. These words of praise festoon the first page of the 1995 paperback edition, celebrating the pyrotechnic wonder of Gass’s accomplishment.
I, like anyone who’s read Gass, am enthralled by his prose. But as of 2025, it seems fair to me to say that Kohler’s case for authenticity—which is to say, the case for Gass as grim fortune teller—is strong. The membrane, never so sturdy, has been permeated; the infected cell is happily reproducing: across Europe and here at home, and who knows where and when it will be content to say: enough; we are making America great again: at airport security, a former midwestern governor repeats her party’s talking points on a loop overhead while we wait to remove our shoes; AM talk radio hosts receive the presidential medal of freedom for their tireless work in the burgeoning field of yelling about things that annoy them; the Oval Office is gilt, and the tawdriness is the point: we have emerged from the tunnel, into the light that William Kohler sought. “So this is why you were digging holes in the basement floor,” says Martha when she finally gleans the scope of Kohler’s work: that though his words be many, and beautiful in their way, he is undermining the integrity of the house, filling its drawers with dirt, plotting an escape that will serve him and him alone. Yes. This is why. To do the work of the filling, and of the dirt.
To be clear about all this, brief as it is: William Gass was one of the most fearsome prose stylists of the twentieth century. Every sentence gleams, every plot point draws blood, every image arrives in rich relief. These sentences and plot points and images are a rich feast for any reader with an appetite. But to lose oneself in the sauce is to miss the fat in this fulsome fare, the gut punch in the geschmack: “the cruelty is the point,” as Adam Serwer wrote in 2018, a point from which we are easily distracted, a destination from which we let ourselves be led away because we don’t want to look. Read, then, The Tunnel as a story about a child whose hurt his now-huge host seeks to force-feed to the world; the story of a man with a job he hates and a wife as lost to him as he is within himself and to the tendencies he has cultivated therein: obscene poems; gardens of remembered resentments; greenhouses of shame with their glass panels gleaming.
It is an American story. Gass has garbed it in the mystery of his craft, but beneath all that, it is only a mirror whose polish offends absolutely anyone who stands before it. That is why it took so long to write, and why its cult will remain small but fervent. When you work with mercury, the poison eventually gets in.
