Reviewed by David Brizer
The Coast of Everything
by Guillermo Stitch
Sagging Meniscus
June 2026, 747 pp, Paperback, ISBN-13: 978-1963846386
From the get-go, Guillermo Stitch’s new novel The Coast of Everything hurls salvos of delicious sentences, voice, and prescient irony that hit the reader broadsides and leave them gasping for crawl space but wanting more. These days, reading – let alone writing – a 747-page novel is a highly transgressive, seditious, treasonous act. This in fact is the main point of the book, a combination sci-fi, noir, tongue-in-cheek simulacra of Dickens, Melville, and The Arabian Nights that makes the point, through many prismatic facets, that free expression, once known to us as literature, has become strictly verboten.
This territory has been mapped before, but never with such ginormous fractals. Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 took us to a ‘distant’ future where beanie-capped guardians (not dissimilar-seeming, in Oskar Werner’s film portrayal, from the puerile gravitas of Mr. Musk) burn books and destroy the citizens who dare read them. Joy Williams’ Harrow limns the same horrid dystopian territory, with an accent on aged hippy pushback. Sam Lipsyte, an up-and-coming writer to be reckoned with, goes there too.
‘We’ (those who still choose to read and prize hefty books, who actually value them for their turgidity and avoirdupois weight, face a common dilemma: what all to do with the surfeit of Stupid that stares us in the face, from every computer screen, conversation, franchised shop window?
Stitch’s answer is to write, and write he does, at great, fluent and malevolent length. The book launches with a Dashiell Hammettesque tourney of a suitably anonymous urban grid transected by innumerable highways, highways and streets that kind of lead nowhere. Narrators weave and spin as the nested tales, stories-within-stories, of this future lugubrious hell, dazzle, collide and sometimes confuse. Commerce and human industry have been centralized, gobbled up; giant factotums, each followed by a trademark symbol (TM), reign supreme. Armadillo-like behemoths of monstrous proportion sweep the traffic lanes, converting prose into tractable surfacing for millions of hovering vehicles:
The bookstores were gone. In theory, there were plenty of permitted books…but the purges
over the years and the martial law of the last few months had thrown a pall over the retail business. (p. 38)
It is a capital crime to own or read a traditional book.
What to do. Vinny, a wannabe writer who might have leapt from the pages of Pynchon, is aided in his deviant plight by the sudden (and sodden) appearance of Charles Dickens, who this go-round mightily favors the ‘sauce.’ The sauce, and plenty of muesli (muesli reminds the bard of Switzerland, one of his favorite places.) At first, Vinny is a tad suspicious – this iteration of Dickens seems a bit too familiar with the vernacular of contemporary/future society. Whatever happened to Edwin Drood? But Dickens reassures: “Drood, schmood…Shit is so stale.”
It just gets better. Some chapters have Victorian headers, all in caps of course, presaging the action within. Stitch is an estimable impressionist as well – he crushes the 19th century narrative voice in sections rife with anachronisms and gilded Oldspeak. (In this regard, and in the sheer volume of The Coast of Everything), Stitch reaches for and often achieves the verisimilitude of archaic patois you see in Barth, Giles’ Goat Boy, The Sot-Weed Factor.
Guillermo Stitch’s debut novel, Lake of Urine (2020), gave a good taste of what was to come. Lake of Urine sandwiches tropes including Gothic horror with satirical blasts at social mores. The Coast of Everything, Stitch’s follow-up performance, is more than performance. It is an outcry, a tour-de-force with wings, for the resurrection of intelligence and, yes, freedom of speech. And the book includes two free recipes.
About the reviewer: David Brizer is a Bronx, NY-based novelist and book critic. His most recent novel, The Secret Doctrine of V.H. Rand, was published by Fomite in 2024. His work has appeared in AGNI, Typo, Word Riot, Exquisite Corpse, failbetter.com, Vol 1 Brooklyn, Compulsive Reader, Rain Taxi.