Books, Arts & Manners: Gass Attack

The Tunnel, by William H. Gass (Knopf, 656 pp., $30)

BACK IN the 1960s, when William Gass started working on this book, there were a lot of people writing what was called at the time “experimental” fiction. The experiment, it turned out, was always the same and involved doing away with the constraints of “conventional narrative” in order to allow the author’s uninhibited “stream of consciousness” to find its own meandering course through a marshy wilderness of random yet predictable feelings of a (mostly) political or sexual nature. None of these experiments was ever seen to have failed—except, of course, commercially. But, having been pronounced more or less successful by the literary-critical fraternity, they were quietly abandoned as their authors became as bored with them as everyone else was and went off to teach “writing” at some wealthy and indulgent university.

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James Bowman

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The Tunnel, by William H. Gass (Knopf, 656 pp., $30)

BACK IN the 1960s, when William Gass started working on this book, there were a lot of people writing what was called at the time “experimental” fiction. The experiment, it turned out, was always the same and involved doing away with the constraints of “conventional narrative” in order to allow the author’s uninhibited “stream of consciousness” to find its own meandering course through a marshy wilderness of random yet predictable feelings of a (mostly) political or sexual nature. None of these experiments was ever seen to have failed—except, of course, commercially. But, having been pronounced more or less successful by the literary-critical fraternity, they were quietly abandoned as their authors became as bored with them as everyone else was and went off to teach “writing” at some wealthy and indulgent university.