Guillermo Stitch: "I don't really write with the aim of exploring themes"

A true literary epic combining numerous narrative strands, Irish author Guillermo Stitch’s sophomore novel The Coast Of Everything is one of the most daring and ambitious books you’ll read this year.

Stylistically, the book shows remarkable imagination, containing elements of detective noir and sci-fi, as well as literary allusions to everything from The Arabian Nights to Dickens.

As Stich explains, rather than a preconceived framework, he allowed the various stories to evolve organically.

“From the beginning, it was going to be a story-within-a-story structure,” he says. “It took about nine to 10 years to write the book. Until the last bit, there was a real balancing act between being present in each story, but remembering that I was also in this larger place. There was connecting tissue.

“I don’t really work in a way where I have ideas I want to explore, and then commit them to paper according to a masterplan. It’s more like letting them make themselves known as I go along.”

One of the main themes that seems to connect each story is the characters’ search for meaning.

“Absolutely,” nods Stitch. “As I touched on, I don’t really write with the aim of exploring themes. But of course, once you finish the thing and read it back, you do realise commonalities and themes. Absolutely, people searching for meaning is in there. As a corollary of that, what are we doing when we search for meaning in what we know to be lies – in stories and fiction.

“What is that? You can write a character that’s searching for meaning – and you are a character that’s searching for meaning. Both of those things are going on. I’m writing a book consisting of stories within stories, all this stuff. It’s interpreting the word in the widest sense – you have storybooks, adventures, movies. And you also have faith and myths – these are all different iterations of the search for meaning.

“I mean, I don’t think I write about people who necessarily find it – but they’re looking!”

In terms of the background to one of The Coast Of Everything’s main characters, Clara, Stitch brings up the famous Middle Eastern folktale collection, The Arabian Nights.

“Clara is a version of Scheherazade from The Arabian Nights,” he says. “It’s not just her, but it includes her. There are five, arguably six narratives to the book. Each one is a story told, and there’s a sense in which the teller is breathing the world of that book into existence – which is to say breathing the world into existence. I’m very attached to Scheherazade and The Arabian Nights, where the basic structure is stories within stories.

“Scheherazade is concubine bride to a psychotic monarch who, because he has been cuckolded previously, has decided that he will marry every day – spend one night with his bride and execute her in the morning, so that he can never be betrayed. Scheherazade is the vizier’s daughter, and she volunteers to marry him because she has a plan.

“The plan is that she’ll tell him stories each night, and stop at such an exciting moment that he can’t execute her, because he needs to hear the rest of the story the following night. They end up falling in love and he’s redeemed. I love that – that you would tell a story as if your life depended on it.”

In terms of its sprawling post-modern feel, The Coast Of Everything partially reminded me of Thomas Pynchon, the author celebrated for classics like The Crying Of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow.

“That’s certainly a compliment,” says Stitch. “By the time I reach the book’s most deeply embedded story of Liam, Pynchon is to the fore. It doesn’t hurt that it starts in California, and it’s kind of a road movie of a narrative. That’s all Pynchon, isn’t it?”

Was Gravity’s Rainbow your favourite Pynchon book?

“It was Mason & Dixon, for me,” says Stitch. “I love when a writer really commits. The style in which he wrote it, Dickensian wouldn’t be the right word, but it was such a committed book, written in that 18th century style. In one sense, it’s an additional challenge to write through a prism like that. I wasn’t in the room, but presumably, Thomas Pynchon still wanted to explore what he does in all his books.

“But he has this additional commitment and responsibility in his in-tray. I think that kind of approach makes it more difficult, but that difficulty is liberating. It means the writer can surprise themselves – happenstance is part of the picture and things will arise that are unexpected, which is where good work comes from.”

Though famously dense and layered, Gravity’s Rainbow boasts such comedic and stylistic flair that even Pynchon’s lengthiest digressions prove irresistible.

GREAT PLEASURE

“That is part of the pleasure,” acknowledges Stitch. “It’s something I admire in his work and the work of others. Going way back, there’s Laurence Sterne’s The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy – you won’t find a more digressive book. Even now, three centuries later, it’s hilarious, mischievous and impish. Pynchon’s a bit like that as well.

“There is a great pleasure in surrendering authority to such a masterful storyteller, and knowing he’s not going to take you where you want or expect to go. He’s going to take you somewhere else, but you’re in good hands.”

For me personally, in recent years Pynchon has unexpectedly risen up my list of favourite authors, chiefly through his influence on filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson. The Pynchonian element in PTA’s work first surfaced in 2012’s The Master, while he later adapted Inherent Vice in 2015.

Famously, Anderson finally won a long overdue Best Director award at this year’s Oscars for One Battle After Another, loosely based on Pynchon’s Vineland. Did Stitch see the movie?

“I loved it,” he enthuses. “I’ve heard mixed comments about it actually, but I loved it. In terms of the book, I own Vineland but I haven’t read it.”

The Coast Of Everything marks Stitch’s first book since his 2020 debut, the strikingly titled Lake Of Urine. How did he find the reaction to that novel?

“It was a joy,” he reflects. “There were some people who didn’t like it, but the vast majority of people who wrote about it did so in glowing terms. Around the age of 40, I sat down to write seriously, having previously avoided it. Up until that point, I hadn’t been leading any kind of literary life. I didn’t know literary people, and I don’t read things as they come out. I wasn’t aware of who was writing what or what the general scene was.

“When it got published and people were writing about it, they were using descriptions like ‘wild’ and ‘brave’. But it was just naïve – I made choices and wrote things because I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to do it that way. People ascribe qualities to it, like iconoclasm, courage or audacity. But actually, it was naivety.”

For the author, committing to his creative vision was exhilarating.

“I was happy in myself that I was sitting down and writing seriously, and I wanted to produce something – and I always will – that was uncompromising.  Not influenced unduly by external expectations like commerciality or respectability, or anything like that. In terms of comparing the two books, I’m partly a humorist, and that’s probably recognisable across both.

“But other than that, they probably could have been written by two different people, This new one, it’s not conventionally structured, but it does deploy swathes of traditional storytelling. Whereas the last one, it was much less traditional storytelling, and much more about having fun with it linguistically.”

With regard to his formative influences, Stitch cites the likes of Beckett and Donald Barthelme, and is a particular fan of Alan Moore, the comics guru celebrated for groundbreaking works like Watchmen, The Killing Joke and V For Vendetta.

However, Stitch is more into Moore’s later literary works, especially the epic novel Jerusalem, set almost wholly in and around the writer’s hometown of Northampton.

“I may have been one of the few people who was very pleased when Alan Moore retired from comics and moved towards novel writing, because I think his novels are magic,” says Stitch. “Jerusalem was one of the reads of my life. I knew of Alan Moore and I’d read some of his comics work, and I’d seen movie adaptations. But I didn’t really get into him until he started writing novels. I mean, Jerusalem knocked me for six.”

COMMITTED BOOK

As it happens, I actually did a lengthy interview with Moore upon Jerusalem’s publication in 2016.

“A lot of the things I was saying about Mason & Dixon apply to it – it’s such a committed book,” says Stitch. “Also, to flatter myself, there’s something in common in terms of what I was saying to you, about trying to be faithful to each story. I was doing that in my book, and trying to remember I was in a larger, interconnected space as well. Moore’s chapters in Jerusalem are about 40 to 50 pages long, and really, many of them read like books.

“They’re complete, little masterpieces. They’re just chapters, but they even have satisfying endings. And yet, when you’ve read the entire thing and begun to process it, you realise the many levels of interconnection. And he also commits to style. There was a chapter in the book about Lucia Joyce, James’s daughter, because she had mental health difficulties, and she was institutionalised in Northampton.

“Also, the whole book is about Northampton – it was just amazing focus. That’s something I admire and maybe I try to replicate. But whether I replicate it or not, it’s something I admire in other writers – that uncompromising commitment to the book.”

• The Coast Of Everything is published on June 16.