Bleak house

THREE decades in the making, William H. Gass’ novel “The Tunnel” was, upon its publication in 1995, raged against and swooned over by critics, but barely read by the general public. No wonder. By then, Gass had earned a reputation for exclusionary prose -- fearsomely intelligent, syntactically obsessed. “The Tunnel” promised 650 pages of the same: rumination and linguistic contortion, this time wrapped around the historical jolt of the Third Reich, defended coolly by a vile protagonist, a bigoted professor of modern history named William Frederick Kohler.

It’s an alluring, intimidating piece of fiction, winding and barbed and bearing a disturbing philosophical complexity. As Gass warns us in the liner notes of the new unabridged audio book of “The Tunnel” -- almost 45 hours long and read by the author -- this is “the ultimate anti-novel, which denies and defies all the ordinary methods of narration, plot, character, and so on. It is the opposite of history.” The fallibility of history, in fact, constitutes one of the novel’s main themes, of which there are several, and none breezy.

An audio book of “The Tunnel”? It seems a quixotic gesture, and not just because of the length of the work. Rather, it is the substance of “The Tunnel” that makes an aural version so unlikely. Narrated by Kohler, who has just completed a controversial opus, “Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany,” the novel interweaves venomous historical reflections with an unblinking personal narrative detailing his despair over his childhood, family and career -- each marked by what Kohler calls the “fascism of the heart.” The pages of this confessional are tucked between the pages of “Guilt and Innocence” so that his wife will not find them. Tucked there, too, are various bits of flotsam: pendants, pennants, ticket stubs, business cards, a paper bag and sketches for banners and insignia of the Party of the Disappointed People, Kohler’s invented league of fellow brokenhearted nihilists.

Textual playfulness (various typefaces, cartoons, shape poems -- the visual surprises) is part of the fun and bafflement of “The Tunnel.” But these are touches that the audio book cannot duplicate, unless, of course, you want to read along. Better, then, to approach it as a wholly new experience, a committed relationship, which, considering the careful pace of Gass’ reading -- making this among the longest recorded novels ever -- it surely is. Forty-five hours is a workweek plus overtime. To listen to the novel at one go would be impractical, so you have to mix it in with life’s routines.

Given the book’s bleakness, this kind of close, constant listening -- practically an antithesis to the motivational tape -- seems an exercise in masochism, a couple of weeks colored by a soundtrack of fear and loathing. The paradox, though, is how “The Tunnel” gets inside you, heightening the dullness and peaks of daily life. Gass’ backlit prose pokes your shoulder like a finger during small tasks and rituals, while his protagonist’s vicious screed colors all sorts of interactions: writing e-mails; slicing a finger while cutting an onion; peering out the window at a fight between neighbors; waiting in line at the coffee shop, at the airport; falling in and out of sleep to Gass’ steady, middle American intonations like a fever dream.

The experience is buoyed by the music of the language as Gass renders it, the metaphors he shapes. As a reader, he is unmatched, possessing a voice -- as he says of one of his characters -- “soothing yet sugarless, deferential, low without sounding sexy, clear through, crisp enough, unaccented, unaffected, proper without being prim -- in short, ideal if it were a telephone operator’s, or if you wished to speak to the dying.” This warm, avuncular tone is lulling but also creates a strange juxtaposition with the content of the novel. So much vitriol, so much relentless bigotry conveyed so gracefully evokes a queer imbalance in the mind.

There is a discriminating mechanism to the act of reading that helps us make sense of a book. Without such a filter, the confessional quality of “The Tunnel” intensifies. Gass pauses, inflects, tweaks the speed of his narration: The plot, such as it is, gathers an emotional momentum even as the experience of listening puts us at some remove from the symbolic elements of the text. The sensation is by no means linear; rather, it is closer to digging (as a tunnel requires), a peeling of Kohler’s intellectual layers to get at his rusted emotional core. As we listen, we begin to comprehend the story’s central sorrow: Kohler, at age 15, committing his father to a hospital and his mother to an asylum. This is the catalyst that triggers his ritual of forcing himself to “disremember,” of training his heart, as he puts it, into stone.

If you expect “The Tunnel” to offer a novel’s requisite life-affirming gesture or moment, you will be disappointed. The affirmation is the telling itself. The language and its rhythms, the metaphors, the acrobatics of delivery compensate for such dispiriting content. The way drums seduce us into dancing, Gass’ language thrums the mind.

This makes sense, given what Kohler’s mentor, German scholar Magus Tabor, insists is the fundamental paradox of history, that “events in nature, in our lives, have little power; they are, at most, like rockets dimming as they flame.... “ Instead, Tabor insists, all experience is fodder for language: “[O]nly words speak past the present; only words have any kind of honest constant visual life.” Heard aloud, that life emerges with one less layer to sieve through, its visceral impact amplified. Unlikely? Yes. But in the end, a vivid reminder of Gass’ (and Kohler’s) belief in “how completely the world survived as the word.” *