THE COAST OF EVERYTHING, by Guillermo Stitch
Guillermo Stitch’s sophomore novel, “The Coast of Everything,” opens in the fictional town of Einpferd, where a bedridden young woman, Clara, prepares to set out on a mysterious journey. It seems that Einpferd is under a curse, its women no longer able to produce “unremarkable children.” Clara’s litter bearers — which include a dwarf and a mute — are representative of the phenomenon. During the long trek up a mountain, they ask Clara for a story to pass the time.
She obliges with “The Tale of the Enchanted Road,” a novella-length narrative about a future world in which fiction is illegal and books exchange hands through a daring clandestine network. Buried in that story is another, “The Tale of the Porter and the Gin,” wherein the ghost of Charles Dickens — here an alcoholic muesli addict — haunts a rebel’s apartment. The Victorian apparition has for some reason written a sci-fi novelette, which becomes the fourth tale and — well, perhaps you’re beginning to get the picture.
Stitch is the pseudonymous author of the 2020 cult novel “Lake of Urine,” an absurdist satire that follows members of a single family in a briskly eventful 200 pages. “The Coast of Everything” is structured like a matryoshka doll, one story hidden within another, slowly submerging the reader beneath significant quantities of narrative material.
The nested fiction is well represented through literary history, from classic works like “Decameron” and “One Thousand and One Nights” — the latter referenced heavily throughout Stitch’s book — to more recent works like “The Garden of Seven Twilights,” by the Catalan writer Miquel de Palol.
These frame narratives can be playful, ironic and compelling, though their secret ingredient is transgression. The best possess an effusiveness that spits in the eye of power as well as the staid and the hidebound. It is precisely this tartness that deepens and complicates these layered confections.
Regrettably, Stitch’s novel lacks this bracing acid. Its multiple narratives sample a range of different traditions, from fairy tales to speculative fiction to hard-boiled noir, though none rises above the level of pastiche. Each is genial, harmless and readable, though my persistent question while reading was: Why? Why fold these loosely connected melodramas, one upon another, into a novel so clearly meant to appeal to readers of avant-garde fiction?
Stitch seems to be celebrating the infinite engine of storytelling itself: “If nothing ever got beyond the once-upon-a-time,” one of his narrators thinks, “then everyone and everything could be a master storyteller, every moment a cliffhanger that stayed hung. No payoffs — that was the payoff.” But as a demonstration of literary extravagance, its 750 pages are all volume and no chops. The novel’s quality justifies neither its length nor its sometimes dizzying formal conceit.
Two of the novel’s nested stories prove more substantial than the others. One, “The Tale of the Isle of Truth,” follows colonists on a remote island as they analyze an archive of lost fictions under the auspices of a shadowy Magistracy. Here as elsewhere in the novel, the powers that be consider fiction a danger, the archive itself referred to as “the accumulated hazmat of millennia” in which “the most powerful toxins are contained.”
The story is tragi-romantic, the tone something akin to Y.A. Mild court intrigue attends the Committee meetings as members argue over the provenance of the recordings, their disagreements deepened by longstanding personal animus. The primary researcher, Arenaceous, and his plucky daughter, Lil, are haunted by a family death, the pair’s intergenerational trauma painted in broad colors.
The prose, a hybrid of hardy Victorian English and speculative argot, glides by benignly. The exceptions — a series of unpunctuated modernist-lite interludes, apparently the thoughts of the mustache-twirling villain — are a strange inclusion. They seem to reach after an otherwise absent profundity.
The novel’s other centerpiece, a 330-page section called “The Tale of the Three Voyages” — one of the fictions from the island archive — follows the private detective Liam Téad, a Philip Marlowe type hired by the daughter of a media tycoon to find her missing sister. Stitch hits his stride here with a rambling neo-noir that borrows its atmosphere as much from late Pynchon as it does from Chandler.
Téad, whisked from California to Morocco to Algeria on his client’s coin, stumbles into dangerous capers, meets enigmatic associates and ingests a great deal of hashish. Red herrings and comic misadventures accumulate. Braided within Téad’s tale is the story of the tycoon’s wife, a first-person account of an immigrant’s journey toward assimilation and marital disappointment. It serves as a grounding counterpoint to the detective’s buzzy, slapdash quest.
At one point in the story, Téad is held at gunpoint by the mayor of Tangier. (Téad has unknowingly helped the mayor’s unhappy son self-immolate alongside his lover. This is somehow not as dark as it sounds.) “If you can tell me something that amazes me,” the mayor says, “I will let you live.” The conceit is of course a reference to the aforementioned “One Thousand and One Nights,” the nested-story ur-text in which Scheherezade extends her life one yarn at a time. It is also the animating sentiment behind Stitch’s novel, a rallying cry for storytelling itself.
“You see yourself as on a quest,” a new friend tells Téad late in the section, “but you move only because something is pulling you. Something that is everywhere, in every direction, and that therefore lies in no particular direction, and is nowhere, draws you towards it.” This omni-directional power is narrative itself, Stitch’s beacon in the maelstrom of human variousness: “Only at the edge of a cliff, on the coast of everything, is it possible to know yourself.”
Whatever truth this axiom may hold, it is not well demonstrated in the fiction at hand. Literature may be amenable to an infinite number of possibilities, but it does not suffer haphazard form lightly. Stitch is in love with the idea of the novel’s freedom, of the potential for fiction to capture life’s texture and variety: “memory, family, connection and loss, kindnesses, cruelties, the possibility of love and the certainty of grief.” But great art requires disciplined form to reflect our confounding ambiguity. For this loose, baggy monster, less would have been a good deal more.
THE COAST OF EVERYTHING | By Guillermo Stitch | Sagging Meniscus Press | 747 pp. | $45