Books like The Tunnel
Downward, by sentences. These novels share Gass’s faith that language can excavate consciousness while also building the elaborate prison in which it rages.
If you liked The Tunnel, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with The Tunnel, and we tell you exactly what.
If what seized you was the spectacle of a formidable intelligence turning grievance into architecture, this is indispensable. Theroux’s abandoned lover constructs an extravagant edifice of accusation: baroque vocabulary, typographical games, learned allusions, grotesque comedy and rhetorical excess. As with Kohler, the narrator’s virtuosity never guarantees his moral authority; the ugliness is part of the novel’s perilous fascination.
Long a cult classic, Darconville’s Cat inspires the sort of devotion reserved for books that seem to have swallowed whole libraries. It is venomous, funny and inexhaustibly verbal—a rare novel whose sentences make obsession feel physically engineered.
Gass’s vast, clause-folded meditations have an essential ancestor in Broch’s modernist masterpiece. Over the final hours of Virgil’s life, perception, memory and argument flow together in immense lyrical movements. The real drama is the mind testing art against suffering, political power and its own compromises—precisely the kind of moral inquiry that The Tunnel refuses to simplify.
Broch does not offer Gass’s bawdy hostility or black comedy; he offers something more elemental: prose pushed toward music without surrendering philosophical exactness. Gass himself was a passionate advocate for Broch, and reading The Death of Virgil reveals a lineage behind his conviction that a novel’s syntax can become its deepest action.
McElroy’s thousand-page labyrinth is the recommendation for anyone who finished The Tunnel wishing contemporary fiction more often attempted the nearly impossible. Its subject is not one life neatly narrated but the pressure exerted on consciousness by other people, technology, history, fantasy and hidden systems of relation. Voices recur and refract; motifs accumulate across enormous distances; understanding arrives less through explanation than through charged connections.
Women and Men has earned a fiercely loyal readership because its difficulty is inseparable from its generosity: it keeps discovering more kinds of attention, more ways minds may touch or fail to touch. Where Gass burrows into a self until it becomes a historical cavern, McElroy makes consciousness expand into a network. Few American novels are comparably ambitious, and fewer make rereading feel so much like entering a different book.