Next Season's Two Month Review Will Feature . . .

Sticking with English-language books about fascism for the moment.

After finishing Vineland by Thomas Pynchon last week, it’s time to announce the next season of the Two Month Review podcast. Generally, we’ve been announcing three at once, since each of us—myself, Brian Wood, Kaija Straumanis—gets a selection, but we’re looking into the actual, physical availability of a couple options, so for now, I’m just going to announce that the next book we’ll be reading is: The Tunnel by William H. Gass.

This is Brian’s selection, and here’s what he has to say about it:

The Tunnel is one of those books I know I’m supposed to have read, but really didn’t want to wrestle with. With the free world going to hell, it seems like a good time wrestle.

Which tracks. Fascism is all the rage these days (ugh), and Gass’s book is one of the most important and beloved of the twentieth-century.

The Tunnel was first published in 1995 by Knopf with this iconic cover:

It was Gass’s fourth work of fiction, following on Omensetter’s Luck (1966; a novel David Foster Wallace once included in a course on books he hadn’t finished), In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968; stories), and Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968; novella/art project).

It went on to win the American Book Award in 1996 and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner. Given its length, complexity, main topic, etc., this is a little bit surprising, but not as surprising as the fact that Dalkey Archive Press was able to get the reprint rights in 1999—a mere four years later.

This was the second Gass book to be reprinted by Dalkey, the first being Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife in an edition that was banned for sale in Singapore, and of particular humor due to the existence of Wm. Masters, Inc., an HVAC company in Normal, IL where Dalkey was based.

Anyway, The Tunnel has been a massive smash for Dalkey. In fact, in July 2024, it was the 8th best-selling title of all time, just behind The Recognitions by William Gaddis, an author Gass is frequently associated with. (Especially since Gass wrote the introduction for the Penguin Classics edition of The Recognitions.) It was even made into the one and only audiobook that Dalkey ever produced—a Lannan Foundation funded project that Gass read himself, and which Jeremy Davies worked on and I promoted and sold to bookstores. It’s an interesting object, and one that we’ll inevitably talk about during this season.

But, just to wrap the Dalkey aspect of this, John managed to acquire the rights to seven other Gass books (making it nine in total), including Cartesian Sonatas and Other Novellas and six works of nonfiction: Finding a Form, Life Sentences, Reading Rilke, A Temple of Texts, Tests of Time, and World Within the Word. Gass is a fundamental Dalkey author, and looking back from a distance of twenty years, I don’t think I fully grasped at the time what a special honor it was to meet Gass in person, and work with him in any capacity. He was a very kind, absolutely brilliant man who left behind some towering, incredible works, and I’m personally excited to share this one with anyone and everyone who’s curious and maybe a little intimidated, or who is a Gass expert and can help steer us along our reading journey.

We do plan on having a lot of guests for this season and providing links and other information to some of the material already out there, and if you’re interested in coming on the show, feel free to contact me!

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Now, Dalkey Archive is bringing out an Essentials edition next spring, but I suspect that a lot of listeners either already have a copy, or can get their hands on one via a used bookstore or library, or are interested in listening to this season as a prelude to reading the book, or are willing to wait until April to get a copy and read along. In theory, this season of the Two Month Review, along with The Tunnel Reader (not to be confused with The William H. Gass Reader) will be perfect on ramps to this remarkable work of literature.

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I’m just realizing now that, while hyping up Gass as a whole, and the book somewhat indirectly, I haven’t shared what it’s about for anyone who is coming to this for the first time. Well, here’s a description from Wikipedia, which happens to be a bit more detailed than any of the existing versions of jacket copy I have at hand:

The Tunnel is the story of William Frederick Kohler, a professor of history at an unnamed university in the American Midwest. Kohler’s introduction to his major work on World War II, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany, the culmination of his years studying the aspects of the Nazi regime in the scope of its causes and effects, turns into The Tunnel, a brutally honest and subjective depiction of his own life and history and the opposite of the well-argued, researched, and objective book he has just completed. When the harsh reality of his work begins to dawn on him, he fears that his wife, Martha, will stumble onto his papers and read his most personal (and cruel) descriptions of his and their life. Because of this fear, he hides the pages of The Tunnel inside of Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany. During this time, he starts to dig a tunnel underneath the basement of his home, eventually hiding the dirt inside the drawers of his wife’s collection of antique furniture.

Given the epic nature of this book, we’ve broken it down into twelve episodes—one for each of the twelve sections in the book. This does not work out as nicely in terms of ~65 pages a week, but I think it’s the most logical way to approach this. So here goes:

October 23: “Life in a Chair” (pgs 1–49)

October 30: “Koh Whistles Up a Wind” (pgs 49–96)

November 6: “We Have Not Lived the Right Life” (pgs 96–146)

November 13: “Today I Began to Dig” (pgs 146–214)

November 20: “Mad Meg” (pgs 214–282)

November 27: NO EPISODE

December 4: “Why Windows Are Important to Me” (pgs 282–334)

December 11: “The First Winter of My Married Life” (pgs 334–385)

December 18: “The Curse of Colleagues” (pgs 386–437)

December 25: NO EPISODE

January 1: “Around the House” (pgs 437–475)

January 8: “Susu, I Approach You in My Dreams” (pgs 475–533)

January 15: “Going to the River” (pgs 534–583)

January 22: “Outcast on the Mountains of the Heart” (pgs 583–End)

See you in a couple weeks!