The title of Guillermo Stitch’s last novel was Lake of Urine. His latest is The Coast of Everything. Clearly the man is a fan of geography. But, then, as a novelist why shouldn’t he be? Bodies of water persist as some of our richest, most versatile metaphors, and if memorable, imaginative storytelling banks on any one device, it’s metaphor. Consider this one: mathematicians tell us that coastlines behave like fractals — that the unique geometric pattern you can read in a given stretch of shore appears again, in miniature, when you zoom in on that same stretch of shore, and again when you zoom in closer (and again, amazingly, when you zoom in closer). It’s a fascinating bit of knowledge in its own right, but when the devoted reader of long, complex novels learns it, they’re bound to be reminded of one long, complex novel in particular: Infinite Jest. No, seriously. Viewed from above, David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus appears not just conceptually inspired by but actually sort of shaped like a fractal, its tripartite form resembling that of a Sierpiński Triangle. For Wallace, here was a structural device to complicate and compound the comparatively simple effects of symmetry — one that betrayed a deep respect for the innovations of other constraint-hugging littérateurs like Georges Perec. For readers, here was a whole new manner of orchestrating meaning, one by which even the quotidian thump of a pair of sneakers being tumbled in a clothes dryer might sound its own fugitive note of distinction. Now, given the near certainty of Mr. Stitch’s awareness regarding these developments in contemporary fiction (if he claims ignorance, he’s a liar on the order of William Gaddis, who denied ever having read Ulysses), we have to wonder whether his new novel, being titled what it is, follows a similar gambit.
And it does — kind of. The Coast of Everything doesn’t come close to matching the structural complexity of Infinite Jest (this turns out to be a good thing), but it certainly strives to arrange its narrative in a conceptually fetching way. Forget triangles-within-triangles, though: Stitch opts for a slightly more straightforward sequence of stories-within-stories, each new bit nested within the preceding one. Think The Canterbury Tales, in that the tales are discrete, but in this case they never end. Or they do end, but not before being interrupted by new ones, as though the Knight’s tale introduced the Miller’s midstream, the Reeve’s tale cropped up amid the Miller’s, and so on. Even better, think Alphabetical Africa, that little-known novel of Walter Abish’s in which successive chapters contain words beginning with successive letters in the alphabet, the first chapter consisting solely of words beginning with the letter “a” (hence the novel’s alliterative title), the second chapter adding “b” words to the mix, the third chapter “c” words, until, by the 26th extrapolation, no word remains off-limits. Rather than draw the story to a close at its most narratively promising point, Abish ingeniously shifts his story into reverse, shedding letters as he shoots backward through another 26 chapters to a conclusion bereft, once more, of anything but “a” words.
The Coast of Everything is a lot like that, consciously sidelining its own storylines, deferring endings in favor of new beginnings. Rather than 52 brief chapters, though, Stitch offers an unhurried sequence of pieces that gradually telescope outward before swiftly contracting across the novel’s last hundred pages. The frame story — the frame enclosing all of the other frames, that is — comes out to some 45 pages long, while the middlemost story — the one around which all of the other stories concentrically wrap, not to say the most consequential — is more than 300.
Unlike Abish, however, who was an experimenter first and a storyteller second, Stitch wastes no time demonstrating his remarkable facility for spinning yarns. That he achieves an inventive shape for his novel will be the proverbial cherry for most readers, who may be so daring as to appreciate formal originality but aren’t likely (and frankly needn’t be) willing to go the distance with a doorstop for the rarefied pleasure of a recognized abstraction. Tangibly and compellingly, with equal attention to the dynamics of plot and character, Stitch’s narrative moves, for the most part, with the fine propellant of a protagonist under pressure (several of them, in fact). It’s also absolutely packed with satisfying sentences, sentences of the sort to (as William Gass once put it) “make an imaginary speaker speak the imagination loudly to the reading eye.” Witness, for instance, the novel’s colorful opening page:
Ceilings.
Skies.
Clara was something of an authority. Ceilings, especially, were the pages of her atlas. On them, she could map worlds.
There were five: the low, bowed beams of the school house and the shadows that trembled around the cantilever struts that rose from them to the ridge of the roof; Dr. Amstutz’s salon with its egg-and-tongue cornice and the dusty glass lampshade in the middle that burned in the daytime, making those parts that fell outside its weak halo seem dirty and dim; the painted church, the pointless cherubs, the bearded men and weeping women, the blue that calmed; the inverted forest of Damocles pans, pots and playthings that hung in the general store from slender threads that made her uneasy; the near-black wood in the kitchen where she sometimes sat while Mila cooked, the glint of its polish that usually lulled her to sleep despite the smell of food and the cook’s chatter; and lastly, the frontispiece — the timber square of the room next to the kitchen that had been made her bedroom and where her elderly father, while he still lived, had painted flowers for her to look at, and here and there among them a bird or a honey bee.
Far from the false front of magisterial prose that so many otherwise hollow books commit the sin of presenting, the generally high watermark of a style marked by balance, rhythm, variation, and lucidity shows up on virtually every page of this book — no small task considering how many pages that is. As for what it’s all about? Well, more than ceilings, to be sure. (Even if ceilings do offer their own promising continuum of coast-ish metaphor — one that vies for the same quality of insight John Ruskin endowed on the iron railings he grew weary watching people wrap around their residences in 19th-century England: Do they lock the world out, or do they lock us in?)
Imagine that Ray Bradbury had locked himself in the basement of UCLA’s Powell Library for nine years instead of the nine mythic days he spent typing out the first draft of Fahrenheit 451. Imagine that, in between writing sessions, he sat in the stacks reading, gobbling up all of Dickens, cloaking himself in the smoky noirs of Raymond Chandler, magically accessing the as-yet unpublished Italo Calvino, and pondering the more puzzling plots of The Thousand and One Nights. Imagine that, as he reflected on the inner workings of his own novel-in-progress, he dreamt up a world in which novels themselves are contraband, the distribution of literature a Promethean crime worthy of a Promethean punishment. . . . In short, imagine Bradbury’s most famous novel, in an expanded, multi-genre format, and you’ll be well on your way to understanding Stitch’s vision.
Because, at its core, The Coast of Everything is a story about storytelling itself. Unlike Fahrenheit 451, however, which crystallizes around a single great character in Guy Montag — Bradbury’s “man on the inside,” a secret savior of books who’s been entrusted with the destruction of them — Stitch’s book offers a crowd of such characters. Almost all of them are interesting (if, in a few cases, also repugnant), the bulk of their charm boiling down to the unlikely nature of their heroism. Consider Clara, the aforementioned ceiling afficionado. Though the novel begins and ends with her, it by no means centers on her. What it does do, crucially, is spring from her.
In the aptly titled “The Coast of Everything,” the novel’s slim frame narrative, the embryo of every further, nested narrative is present in the form of Clara’s impulse (as good as any) to relieve tedium. In this case it’s the tedium of travel. It’s at the prompting of a bored dwarf named Jordi, one of two pals in charge of schlepping the disabled Clara’s sedan chair, that she begins telling “The Tale of the Enchanted Road.”
And that tale — strange to say since it issues from what appears to be a 19th-century, maybe an 18th-century, mouth — is classic noir down to the studs. But rather than a cool, capable Philip Marlowe type at the helm of the story’s action, it’s a hapless sports journalist by the name of Billy Stringer. Billy’s problems begin when agents from the same private corporation that’s been vetting him for employment (Gripping Tails™ converts literature into automotive fuel) begin tailing his car as his increasingly complicated life sends him in what seems like several directions at once. In a society where works of fiction aren’t just the raw material for a bulk liquid commodity but are actually illegal to possess, Billy’s attempts to navigate competing commitments to his career, to his ex-girlfriend, and to a budding interest in fiction clash to reproduce the same atmosphere of paranoia that every reader of imaginative prose must experience in a postliterate (even antiliterate) society. It makes for a genuinely thrilling start to the novel.
And while it is classic noir, it’s also what we might have to start calling classic Stitch. Interspersed throughout this section are a number of clearly deliberate, peculiarly camouflaged snippets from the works of other writers and artists, and they are marvelous. Swimming somewhere in the membrane between text and subtext, each of these snippets — what else to call them? — amounts to a kind of cross between a simple allusion, a complex bit of ekphrasis (think Ishmael’s extended description of that torpedoed Turner hanging in the entryway of the Spouter-Inn in Moby-Dick), and the splendid kind of collage Tom Comitta assembles when he writes a chapter to a book like Patchwork.
In one instance, Stitch describes a “diner [with] windows facing onto Greenwich and De Nuys that curved seamlessly at the corner”:
Especially at night, the brilliantly lit place was a fishbowl. There were no tables at the windows because there was no room for tables. A cherry-wood bar — triangular, to conform with the acute angles of the building — almost filled it. There was room only for the round, leather-topped stools that lined it and for a customer to squeeze by them. [. . .] Just three figures hugged the bar but they were no early birds. They were night hawks. With their backs to him, a guy in a dark suit and a steel-gray hat and a redhead in a red dress had that sated, lounging air about them that came from a night spent dancing.
It’s not that no one’s ever thought to put into words the furniture and figures filling Edward Hopper’s famous painting of a downtown diner, but to do so as seamlessly and casually as Stitch does here, as though in passing — who does this? Each snippet so expertly serves the purpose of advancing the story’s plot that its status as foreign material is liable to go unrecognized. This particular snippet serves as setting for a clandestine meeting between Billy and a member of Gilgamesh, an underground group of book-reading terrorists. The effect such a snippet creates, by the way, is one of improbable resonance — something far deeper than the mere recognition of an intertextual reference (the only similarity that comes to mind being the experience of reading the aforementioned Patchwork: odd echoes of one’s personal reading crop up in the course of a book constructed solely from the sentences of other books). Similarly executed scenes elsewhere light up the reader’s frontal lobe like the lure of an anglerfish, as when a couple of passages that are profoundly redolent of locations and moments in Chandler’s The High Window amplify the story’s noirishness in a manner that can’t easily be explained.
So call it classic Stitch, but be ready to bemoan, in the very same breath, the book’s handful of shortcomings, which begin to accrue almost as soon as the following story crashes this one’s party. Offering its own matrix of references to “The Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies” out of The Thousand and One Nights, “The Tale of the Porter and the Gin” leaps from the mouth of Billy’s ex’s brother, Vince. An avowed book addict and hotel porter — a Gilgamesh man whose attempts to recruit Billy have complicated their relationship, to put things mildly — Vince promises Billy that he will “literally go out of [his] mind” if he fails to divulge the secret that’s been boiling inside his brain: namely, that he returned home one day to discover the ghost of Charles Dickens lounging in his bathtub.
What in the dickens indeed. While the ghost introduces a welcome note of comedy to the proceedings — he’s constantly getting twisted on hard liquor, passing out, soiling himself — to say that this storyline sags slightly is to do a disservice to the degree of sag achieved by the story that interrupts it in turn, and the reader won’t be long in waiting for that interruption. Stitch is consistently imaginative in the way that he glides from one section to the next. Here, “The Tale of the Isle of Truth” springs in manuscript form from the masterful pen of the author of Great Expectations, but don’t get your hopes up — much of that mastery seems to have gone to seed. Running to roughly twice the number of pages that precede it, this stretch of the novel promises to offer readers, to an extent not easily imagined elsewhere, a real reason to throw the book across the room. This is a sad state for any book to assume, but it’s especially sad here, since Stitch offers such a strikingly original system of rewards just about everywhere else in his novel. It’s not that the quality of the prose suddenly starts to suffer in this section. On the contrary, Stitch might easily have expended the majority of his energies hammering out the deliberately Dickensian sentences that stuff it. It’s just that they stuff it like so much crinoline. No one should ever blame an author for endeavoring to follow in the footsteps of a master like John Barth, but a good part of what makes the latter’s masterful mimicry in The Sot-Weed Factor of 18th-century picaresques so successful is the congruence between style and subject. In Stitch’s case, Dickens has written neither a story of his time nor of Vince’s but of the far future, and science fiction has simply never mixed well with the needlessly genteel diction (“Seven of the clock”) and unwieldy syntax that induced the frumpiest Victorians to make whole meals out of their simplest sentiments.
An immediate narrative disconnect emerges on this basis alone. But the workings of the plot feel lackluster, too. Animating this tale, which does take place on an island, is a trove of works of “ancient” literature in the form of rediscovered audio files. A small crew of colonists spend hours listening to them, the stories amounting to the substance of their assignments (different forms of textual evaluation enacted at the behest of an unseen, all-powerful magistrate) and their only real form of entertainment. They’re not supposed to enjoy their jobs, per se — not in this way, at least — but who can resist a well-told story? The tension that occasionally emerges between the apparently conflicting senses of duty and leisure is interesting, but such little interest couldn’t possibly power a craft this ponderous. Even what could be construed as the story’s one saving grace — a father-daughter dynamic that tugs a heartstring or two in the course of engaging a family drama sufficiently demented and tragic to have issued from Faulkner’s pen — isn’t enough to save it either.
Fortunately, “The Tale of the Isle of Truth” gives rise (the island-dwellers click “play”) to “The Tale of the Three Voyages,” which just so happens to offer the novel’s most captivating span of pages. A return to hardboiled form, it includes several of the trappings we’ve come to expect of the genre, from the classic MacGuffin of a missing woman and oodles of highly controlled dialogue to consciousness-bending encounters with exotic controlled substances. It’s also, as mentioned earlier, the last and longest of the novel’s sections, a solid 50% longer than its direct predecessor. All of which gives its protagonist, one Liam Téad — a much smoother operator to Billy Stringer’s bumbling oaf — plenty of room to perambulate, figurative magnifying glass in hand. When Liam travels halfway around the world to locate a rich man’s vanished wife, the tale’s tenor and tempo draw as readily on Chandler as on Voltaire’s Candide.
It’s thanks to this roaming quality that the book wins back its forward momentum — and then some. While most novels move toward a single conclusion, this one moves toward no fewer than five. Liam’s is only the first. It isn’t arbitrarily situated, either. His tale of detection is also a tale of cultural transmission, its geographical movement — Southern California to North Africa — serving as an analogue for the migration of stories themselves. Throughout The Coast of Everything, Stitch returns to this central truth. Even the most squarely nested narratives refuse to remain contained; they peck through the shells designed to enclose them. Look no further than the impulses that gave birth to each of the book’s sections. Whether it’s quenching boredom, subverting authority, exercising the imagination, or capturing the past, most stories can’t help but outgrow their original purpose.
Having crossed off every tale within her sphere, we return to Clara. But her story was never hers to tell. We finish with Stitch, whose conclusion — the conclusion of all conclusions — feels well earned. “Endings are terrifying,” he writes. “But beautiful. They make a story of what came before.” The Coast of Everything is extraordinary, a toweringly ambitious novel that, despite its flaws, restores its readers’ faith in the messy business of literature that strives to last.
Eric Bies is the founding editor of Orange County Review of Books (now also available as a reader-supported Substack). His writing has appeared in World Literature Today, Asymptote, Open Letters Review, and American Book Review.