The Tunnel, William H. Gass, Alfred A. Knopf, 1995 Straight Man, Richard Russo, Random House, 1997

The advice most oft given to students of writing is: Write about what you know. This dogma may be held to account as one of the major reasons why the late 20th century boasts an oversupply of novels set in academia. Indeed, some writers may have come to regard the teaching of writing, particularly in colleges, as existing primarily to provide would-be novelists with a white-collar living, and a subject, while they write. As a novelist never employed as a teacher, I have wondered if teaching is really a good thing for writers of fiction. “The Tunnel,” by William H. Gass, and “Straight Man,” by Richard Russo, juxtapose neatly to illustrate many of my reservations about the unholy consortium of fiction writing and the teaching of writing.

Russo, the author of “Nobody’s Fool,” commences “Straight Man” with a remembrance of the narrator’s childhood, in which a determined boy sets himself to getting a dog from his academic parents. This hilarious passage uses the commonplaces of a boy’s desire for a dog, the politics within a family, and the banging of a screen door to exquisite effect. In Russo’s previous novels, the protagonist’s father usually exerts influence upon wife and children largely through his abandonment of them. Time heals these paternal wounds and the scars remain.

Russo sets the contemporary action of “Straight Man” among academics at a small western Pennsylvanian college at a time of budgetary crisis likely to bring about reductions in staff: several somebodies are going to be fired. The interim chair of the English department, William Henry Devereaux Jr., was once a boy campaigning for a dog. He has grown to be a writer and teacher, though his first novel, published 20 years previous, seems to have been his last. Hank, as he is called along with a plethora of rude names, says it’s easy to be the straight man in an English department, but Hank is in fact relentlessly funny. His inability to take anything or anyone seriously irritates his peers into a frenzy.

The motley crew of professors he putatively chairs may be a lot of has-beens, drunks, philanderers and incompetents, but they are his motley crew; he is one of them. Hank Devereaux is a man incapable of judging others more harshly than he does himself, and he judges himself to be a little better than his father’s son. He suffers from doubts about his wife’s fidelity, while seeing those doubts as more his failure than hers; he suffers his own writer’s block without complaint, as what was meant to be; he suffers what he suspects is a kidney stone with something like relief, for it is what he expects to prove him his similarly afflicted father’s son.

His father is what he does not want to become, and yet he has taken up his father’s profession, and lives a life that is very like his father’s, without his father’s professional successes — or his father’s philandering, so far. Hank’s adoption of the role of Klass Klown is the acting out of a boy’s desire for attention from the heedless, self-absorbed parent. This is one novel of midlife crisis in which the protagonist is a decent kindly man, whose sense of humor prevents him taking himself too seriously.

Russo tidies up at the end of the novel, allowing the reader to know that Hank is assembling essays published in a local paper, including the remembrance that opens the novel, for publication. This signals Hank Devereaux’s realization that the life he has lived for the 20 years since the publication of his novel has not been without product. He is still a writer.

As is Russo, who writes of academia as one who does indeed know; he only recently gave up teaching at Colby College in Waterville. He allows Hank to observe perceptively:

“Virtually everybody in the English department has a half-written novel squirreled away in a desk drawer. … All elegantly written, all with the same artistic goal — to evidence a superior sensibility.”

So writes Russo, and explains William Gass’ novel, “The Tunnel.” The desire to evidence a superior sensibility overwhelms the actual telling of the story.

Like “Straight Man,” “The Tunnel” is the story of a professorial midlife crisis, though set in the ’70s and amid a history rather than an English department. As in “Straight Man,” “The Tunnel” presents a cast of academic characters and family, including remembrances of the narrator’s childhood. There is even a parallel bit of business over a boy wanting a dog. Like Hank Devereaux, the narrator, William Kohler, has published a book as a young man and 30 years later, has only completed a second. It would be an understatement to describe him as a disappointed man; he is a world class whiner. I do not wish to fall into the error of taking the author for his character, but the similarities between Gass and William Kohler are very strong, inviting such a presumption of veiled autobiography, and Gass gives no hint that he sees Kohler with any distance.

“The Tunnel” has actually gathered dust on the bookshelf for two years. Though the story idea, mentioned in the flap copy, of a man attempting to tunnel his way out of his own life piqued my interest, the length of the novel demanded a fairly large chunk of my time. Once into it, at last, I found it was larded with many changes of type and graphics in color that did not, as far as I could see, ever add anything but irritation to the story. The flap copy informed me that the author, Gass, had spent 30 years writing this novel. Apparently, much of his three decades of work had been spent in doodling. Gass throws into the manuscript a fistful of limericks that doubtless he found very funny, but that for me were like encountering okra in my soup. If unfunny limericks were not enough, Kohler is a deeply unlovely, splenetic character who adheres to that view of humanity that declares we are all Nazis at heart, just give us the chance. The reader wades through passages of stream-of-consciousness, that irritating literary device that, in attempting to depict thought processes, manages more frequently to depict the mental confusion of a drunk.

That said, “The Tunnel” occasionally bursts into prose that is breathtaking. This, from a juvenile essay of the narrator’s:

“A book, I wrote, is like a deck of windows: each page perceives a world and tells a fortune; each page at least faintly reflects the face of its reader, and hands down a judgment; each page is made of mind, and it is that same mind that perceives the world outside, and it is that same mind that reflects the world within, and it is that same mind that stands translucently between perception and reflection, uniting and dividing, double dealing.”

“The Tunnel” seems to me to be a thin masterpiece trying to escape a fat overwritten one, the work of an immensely talented writer writing, regrettably, to impress his academic peers with his artistic sensibilities.