By Guillermo Stitch.
My ‘novel’, The Coast of Everything, was published on June 16th (Bloomsday, cheekily enough) and in fairly short order had accumulated a number of lengthy reviews in prominent places that exhibited a conspicuously uniform hostility and (the author would suggest) misunderstanding.
It was almost as if a memo had gone around — indeed, one reviewer explicitly suggests that one at least should have. But conspiracy theories are not necessary to explain what I see as groupthink. It wasn’t really my book (as I believe the following essay will demonstrate) that was reviewed — it was ‘this sort of thing’.
I detect two principal objections across the reviews. Firstly, that an attempt at ‘this sort of thing’ is unfashionable to the point of being unacceptable and secondly, that if you are going to do it, it had better be masterful. One reviewer at least finds my book to be wanting in that specific regard.
It isn’t my place to assert my mastery. I’ll leave that judgement to readers, but will accept the judgement only from attentive readers — a criterion against which the reviewers in question have fallen short. I do still hope the book is read. But I also believe that much of what it is and does has been lost in a series of, dare I say it, careless misreadings, and I felt compelled to write this response, in defence of it and as a possible way in for those interested in reading attentively.
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Even before the reader engages with the text of The Coast of Everything something of the book’s project has been, if not quite announced, then certainly hinted at. The acknowledgements include “the nameless authors of the Nights and their numerous translators” and the copyright page reveals that a previously published work, the novella Literature™, now finds itself embedded in this larger book. So there is already at least one tale within a tale.
The dedication, “For Dad”, is another indicator in a work that will concern itself, at some considerable length but never head-on (the head-on is avoided throughout and this avoidance is key to the book’s strategy) with patriarchal figures in various guises.
In the form of a request — “Why don’t you tell us a story, Clara? It might help pass the time” — the book makes a promise at the outset that the next 700+ pages will test to its limit, and perhaps to its breaking point. The promise is Sharazad’s: that storytelling is a way to stay alive.
Clara, on whom The Coast of Everything opens, is a paraplegic girl being carried up a hill by her companions, towards a mysterious event referred to only as “the unveiling”. Clara has a strange gift — with her one eye, she can isolate a quadrant in her field of vision, then a quadrant of that, then of that and so on without apparent limit till she can perceive impossibly tiny or distant things. This same gift will be reiterated in other contexts in other parts of the book — one of many details and patterns that leech from one part to another, and sometimes from one character to another. Hers is the first absent male figure — a deceased father from whom she has inherited a paltry few books, from which she has nevertheless acquired a love of storytelling, and which will influence the tale(s) she tells her companions.
The structure of what follows has been described as tale-within-tale, a Matrushkya doll, a Möbius strip, a chiasmus, a ring. Clara tells The Tale of the Enchanted Road, The Tale of the Porter and the Gin, The Tale of the Isle of Truth and The Tale of the Three Voyages — but not in sequence. They each, while incomplete, give way to the next before returning later in mirrored order. The exception is The Tale of the Three Voyages which is the most deeply embedded, longest and only uninterrupted tale in the book.
A-B-C-D-C-B-A — seven segments. The architecture of Clara’s narration resounds continually in the detail of her inventions — The Warburg’s (narrative C) basic layout, “a cluster of wooden huts — seven of them”, Jewel’s beach bungalows (D) “just one of seven rather ramshackle homes in a row” (Liam’s own rented unit is number seven), the Zades’ luxury home development (D) is “a series of seven terraces” each with its own prefab. Later in the same tale, another cluster: “an irregular little complex of seven asymmetrical structures” and ‘seven torches held aloft by seven hands . . . seven minds and seven curiosities.” “Seven of the clock” is the hour of the “Reviews” or “Entertainments” on the Warburg (C). Clara’s attachment to the structure and the number may be a result of the natural world around her, where the “seven heads of the massif peered down at the Wahrberg from the north” (frame tale).
The “irregular little complex of seven asymmetrical structures” could be a description of the narrative structure itself. There is a distinct asymmetry, and an accordion-like expansion and contraction, to each tale’s relative size and relationship with the others. Narratives A and B are short and shorter again — there is also a direct narrative link. Narrative C evidences no (obvious) narrative link with either, is long, and gives way to an even longer Narrative D, a return (to some degree) to the style of narrative A, if only to deconstruct it. So although the ABCDCBA chiasmus is (arguably, potentially) static, life is breathed into it in this helix-like progression, on the one hand, and its rendering as a Möbius strip, on the other. Two opposite readings are made simultaneously plausible in the book’s treatment of time — that it simply doesn’t matter, and that it is the only thing that does.
The points at which the tales cut off and later return are not arbitrary. In various ways and to various degrees, the returns do two things — they deliver a pay-off at a dramatic crisis point and they force a reinterpretation of the part of that tale leading up to its interruption. This may be what has made numerous early readers go back and read the book again.
Narrative A, The Tale of The Enchanted Road (previously Literature™), could be described as sci-fi noir. It owes much to Raymond Chandler and also to Philip K. Dick. After a “Second Enlightenment”, literature has been ‘elevated’ from its previously inutile condition and optimized as a consumer product via technology that can harness the cognition of a reading brain to (literally) drive road vehicles. The owner of this technology is a company called Gripping Tails™. To launch the proprietary tech, the company must extinguish all forms of literature which do not not interact safely with the new drive. A clueless young hack by the name of Billy Stringer, who normally works the sports desk, has been assigned to cover the launch. Billy is having a very bad day — he is dressed like a clown, a circumstance that has something to do with being ghosted by his girlfriend, and he has another serious issue: he is a part of the problem Gripping Tails™ is so keen to solve.
One layer deeper, narrative B — The Tale of the Porter and the Gin — is recounted by Vince, a character in narrative A. This tale might be considered the most unambiguously comic and absurd. But it will become, at least arguably, the story of a young man losing his mind to paranoia and alcohol. Vince finds himself sharing his apartment with the ghost of Charles Dickens, a (decidedly flawed) mentor of sorts. The part of this narrative that leads up to its interruption culminates with the ghost of Charles Dickens having written a novel.
Narrative C — The Tale of the Isle of Truth — is the novel that the ghost of Dickens writes and that Vince now reads. It is an account of the last days of a closed colony, the few remaining inhabitants of which are forbidden access to any knowledge of the wider world. The world in question is ruled by The Magistracy, an organization that, in a morbid intensification of Enlightenment values, seeks to purge societies of magical thinking — including fiction, which it considers hazmat. At this point on the journey, the reader might see The Magistracy as a metastasized Gripping Tails™ (A).
The purpose of the closed colony is either detective or archival — the question of which is one of the narrative’s plot points. ‘Station Warburg’ therefore exists under absolute quarantine, being also a storehouse for hazmat materials. It is ruled over by Jasper Fafl (the Stationmaster), a portrait of envious male mediocrity elevated to power by inhuman bureaucracy. This tale is (the author would suggest) the most technically exacting and intricately plotted. Although constraint and intertextuality (and more broadly, my contention that books are made of other books) are features of The Coast of Everything throughout, at this point in a reading The Tale of the Isle of Truth is the clearest example — and not merely because, for obvious reasons, the tale is rendered in a Dickensian register. The foundational text in the basic premise of this narrative is Italo Calvino’s Un re in ascolto (A King Listens) or, more specifically, his adaptation of it as a libretto for the ‘musical action’ of the same name by Luciano Berio, which is how I first encountered it:
A king is prisoner of his own throne room, unable to leave his seat (lest he lose it). All he can know of the world beyond the room is what he can overhear — muffled voices, footsteps, creaking noises and so on. His efforts to interpret these sounds lead him further and further into paranoia.
This paranoia permeates The Tale of the Isle of Truth — the maddening unknowability of events elsewhere which will seal the colonists’ fate. It is felt primarily by Lil, the daughter of Arenaceous Nell and inheritor of an old grievance between her father and the Stationmaster. She (as her name intimates) will pay the price for it and the inevitability of this sets a dolorous tone to the story as it unfolds, both retrospectively in the slow reveal of her father’s history with Fafl and in the terrible events that unfold inexorably around her now, made all the more terrible as they must be navigated by way of the excruciating proprieties of Dickensian politesse and Victorian decorum.
There’s a king-shaped hole at the centre of this tale too but for a different kind of king. The mood is ‘dolorous’ because the tale will make its way along the Dolorosa via another text that underlies The Tale of the Isle of Truth: the Stations of the Cross. At the centre of the story is a Christ arc, but no Christ — the arc is shared by more than one character. The tale of Station Warburg, presided over by the Stationmaster, is templated by the Stations — the last supper, the agony in the garden, the meeting of the women of Jerusalem, the help of Simon of Cyrene and so on.
Of numerous other, external texts that find their way into this tale’s design, the most evident is self-penned and intrudes physically in the form of interpolations that together constitute their own narrative thread, making the Isle of Truth a frame tale as well as an embedded one. The colonists gather each evening to listen to a series of audio recordings — tantalizing breaches of the Warburg’s quarantine — of a nameless father telling his daughter, Lita, a story. He does so remotely, from a great distance, in a supplicant tone that seeks forgiveness — in this and in remaining nameless and invisible, he could be argued to be the book’s purest distillation of something that lies at the heart of it. But more on that later. Elements of this interpolating story become drivers of plot in Tale of the Isle of Truth. When the latter comes to an end, the sequence of audio fragments remains incomplete — the last of them is missing.
It is within one of these audio fragments, as the unnamed father recounts to Lita a time he told her mother a story, that narrative D, The Tale of the Three Voyages, begins (and ends).
Narrative D is the tale a remorseful husband tells his wife to stave off her death — it is long. At its outset, another metastasis — Billy Stringer (A) is recalled here in the somewhat older Liam Téad, a character who from the off announces the tale’s genre self-awareness. In his invocation of the Philip Marlowe novels as a sort of ideal, he sets himself up to spend the following 300 pages falling short of it, even as it — the neat, genre-bound ‘reality’ he longs for — itself falls apart.
Liam is a transplanted Irishman in California, pretending (including to himself) to be a private detective. He has come, ostensibly, to take care of his mother on the death of her husband — but that motive is short-lived. He finds himself hired by the wealthy young heiress of a global tech empire to help her find her twin sister. What follows is the book’s clearest reminder that coast is a verb as well as a noun — Liam has no apparent agency in this search. To have any chance of success he must submit to the process. To go along.
“Come with me,” said Sherry. “But I need you to have faith in me. Not everything in the following chapters will be revealed to you. Some things you will see and understand — some things you will see and not understand.” She shot a look towards his arm as the needle pierced his skin. “And some things you will not see. I need you to be OK with that. Can you do that?”
Whether he can or not will take around 300 pages, an ocean and two continents to determine. If he is to comply with his client’s request he will need, finally, to show a recursive faith in her faith (in him). In this, Liam represents the reader. This is the narrative that asks most of the reader precisely because it shows most faith in the reader. The reinterpretations required elsewhere are writ large here. Nothing can be taken for granted.
The final scene of The Tale of Three Voyages delivers what may be the book’s most destabilizing (or re-stabilizing — at this point it depends on your point of view) moment. Another story must be told — once again to stave off death. At first it seems the teller is unable, but eventually Clara’s visual trick is replicated, in a game of I Spy, to get a story going. (The technique has also been Liam’s, perhaps most notably as he looks at a bird cage in Tangier, in a scene underpinned by Rilke’s The Panther, but also just moments before this new story begins, as a way to understand the teller’s difficulty — and at last, with just an iota of agency, how he can help.)
The first two words of this new narration force the reader to consider the possibility that the narrator is the real Sharazad, and Clara her invention; that the teller isn’t merely getting a story going but getting the story going, here on page 654; that there is no reliable way to distinguish frame from tale and no way at all to distinguish beginning from end. A series of chapters which the reader has taken to be a particular character’s monologues, delivered to Liam within the tale’s time frame, may be nothing of the sort, but intercessions from another character—the narrator, in fact— who has been hidden till now and which are addressed directly to the reader.
Themes? Your guess is as good as mine. As I’ve stated elsewhere, I don’t write with the aim of exploring themes—the idea seems banal to me. I am interested in people. But of course things emerge. Unavoidably, the reader will detect the motif of storytelling itself, specifically storytelling as a survival mechanism—as a way of staving off death in the most extreme case, but also as a way of bearing the unbearable.
The commodification of culture, of feeling, of attention, of intelligence, of thought itself—most explicitly in The Tale of the Enchanted Road but reverberating elsewhere in the relationship between institutions (private and public) and people.
Something is also happening with names, and with the withholding of names. Some of the most consequential characters in the book are never given names, while many characters who appear only once and who are little more than props are given perfectly good (and, conventionally, unnecessary) names. Some of the names in question are repeated across narratives, reassigned to disparate characters — who don’t seem to have anything to do with each other— either symbolically or as though evidencing the limits of Clara’s (or Sharazad’s) memory and imagination.
The naming of things too. The attribution of the ™ symbol to feelings and abstractions in The Tale of The Enchanted Road; the long, ornate lists; principally, the uses of Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours in several contexts — as a word game between mother and daughter, a plot device, a farewell, Liam’s hallucinatory reverie on the hotel terrace — but always having something to do with a parent-child relationship, with some familial injury. Taxonomy as a way of dealing with difficulty, of pinning down the pain that threatens to get away from us.
This has something to do with the visual trick that infuses the book; while it doesn’t come up in every narrative it does run from the ‘frame’ tale to the ‘most deeply embedded’. The methodical narrowing of visual focus onto a smaller and smaller area until an overwhelming (or uninformative) whole has been whittled down to the manageable (or revelatory). A taxonomy of the eye and a similar mechanism for control, analgesia, endurance — variously expressing wonder, failure, cruelty and erasure. It is left to Liam, sitting on the hotel terrace as the sun sets, to combine these two strategies, the visual and the verbal — the only instance of this in the book.
But none of the above are themes (the author would suggest) as much as prisms, through which what may be the book’s central pursuit is refracted.
Every narrative in the book, each tale of love and grief, unfolds or unfurls in the wake of a distant and retreating paternal presence — and each protagonist’s arc is bound in some way to that retreat. Clara holds on to what she can of her father through the few books of his that she has hidden from her mother; Billy’s father is never even mentioned and his mother, with whom he has a troubled relationship, lives alone, lost in drink to grief or abandonment; Vince, in his descent, is chased by his mother but his father plays no part — and Vince is conspicuously quick to latch on to his mentoring lodger; Lil is abandoned as a young girl when her father, in his own grief, retreats into addiction, and later, when she has him back, condemns them both to part again; Liam, too, who has a troubled relationship with his mother, only refers to his father once, and obliquely, as he remembers childhood stays in his grandfather’s house, watching the lights of night traffic play across the bedroom ceiling, “the same light show that would tease a hundred happy endings as he, smaller still, would wait for them to get home, this when it was still the both of them”; Zade, the father of the twins, broods through the central narrative but is never given a proper name and is known to us only through the recollections of his wife (who loathes him pathologically), or glimpsed briefly and unresolved when a lamp reveals the mere half-outline of him on the other side of a two-way mirror.
Pursuit — I choose the word advisedly. What a book is or isn’t is not up to its author, but it does seem to me that The Coast of Everything is one long (and unending) chase. The hunt for an impossible prey — the dead father. How fitting then that in the final scene, as Clara’s brain storms — and any distinction between one character and another, one story and another, one textual level and another, breaks down completely in a failure of the book’s carefully constructed architectures — we return to the elusive patriarch of Narrative C’s audio fragments, recounting his remorse to Lita. And how perfect that the book’s final two words (in as much as any two words in the book can be considered final) are not only spoken by this absent, receding patriarch, but also give a damning verdict on the inevitable outcome of the chase.
“I’m running.”
This interpretation reframes the framing device itself. That a tale be embedded in another tale becomes less a formal device than a necessity, because the end of such a tale can be survived — there is always more story. Partings can be borne.
It also, of course, reframes the book as a failure — an undertaking that was destined to fail. A book, one might even argue, whose major theme and governing principal is failure. The poor reception it has had in some quarters might be appropriate, after all. Those who insist on requiring of a book that it feed some pre-existing appetite or satisfy a particular set of measures, or who are disdainful of the deployment of genre, will be disappointed.
Which brings me back to Luciano Berio’s Un re in ascolto. ‘Musical action’ was Berio’s own term — he refused to call it an opera. I’ve read that he could be quite snippy about it. I don’t think he could really blame people for thinking of it as an opera — I know I did as I sat watching it in the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. I wonder now about the point he was making. Perhaps he felt he had created a work that, while not conforming to the established tenets of opera, nevertheless had some value. Perhaps the redesignation was an appeal for fresh, open eyes and ears.
To think of The Coast of Everything in novelistic terms is obviously broadly appropriate, and certainly understandable — it will sit alongside novels on a bookshelf — and yet somehow misses the mark. This essay merely scratches the surface, but at least it does scratch the surface. How can it be that none of the above has been picked up by critics at prestigious outlets? It isn’t that they don’t catch it all, or that they detect disappointingly little of it — this initial, entry-level critique. They account for precisely none of it. What each review has in common with the others is that it reads like the report of a surveyor who can’t find the front door, and so (for his supper) surveys the facade.
Of course, the expectation cannot be that every reader readily perceives every reference, every source text, every strategy. A book like this should be too rich to efficiently deliver all that it has to offer a casual reader on the first pass. It’s probably true (but terrible marketing) to say that this book is not for the casual reader but, despite the tangle of allusion, an active and creative reader can still find multiple rewarding ways through. Again, these are stories of real love and real grief — available to all. They’re not for everyone, but anyone is welcome. A vibrant literary culture (the author would suggest) is one that makes room for ‘this sort of thing’ and the writers, and readers, who are up for it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Guillermo Stitch is the author of Lake of Urine (Sagging Meniscus 2020) and The Coast of Everything (Sagging Meniscus 2026), and executive editor of Exacting Clam. He lives in Spain. The Coast of Everything is reviewed here.
