Threshold

Starred review from October 1, 2019

Rob is an Irish writer living a peripatetic existence. He never settles in one place for long, sometimes decamping to Paris or Berlin for a few months to work on a novel or visiting Zagreb or Blanes, Spain, on assignment. Wherever he goes, he beats the boundaries between traveling and tripping, drinking and experimenting with psychedelic drugs while reading and writing. Oftentimes, Rob's journeys entail visiting the resting places of writers he admires, as well as museums and clubs, shadowing the pursuit of new experiences by honoring the dead. But what is this book? Memoir? Travelog? Fiction? It doesn't matter. Rob observes that a novel is whatever he tells it to be, that it is, ultimately, something to read. VERDICT Confidently told, this second long-form work from Doyle (after Here Are the Young Men) alternates 11 vignettes with letters to an anonymous correspondent as the masterly narrative pacing brilliantly counterbalances lurid episodes and sometimes terror with devastating wit and epiphany. As ever, Doyle's prose is compulsively readable, and his insights always credible and occasionally astonishing.--John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 25, 2019
Doyle (This Is the Ritual) follows in this poignant tale an itinerant narrator as he searches for personal enlightenment. The narrator, 30-something Rob, recounts his adventures through a series of letters to an unknown recipient, composed mainly of ruminations on spirituality and the nature of truth alongside reminiscences of stories about his adventures across the globe. Among these are his expedition foraging for psychedelic mushrooms in Ireland, his visit to the graves of famous writers in Paris, his time at Buddhist meditation retreats in Southeast Asia, and his druggy clubbing lifestyle while living in Berlin. Throughout, he carries on lively, often humorous discussions with himself about identity that hover on the edge of chaotic existential crisis: “I swam in the sea and had the ecstatic drunken insight that everything is transient, everything is eternal, both statements are true.” Doyle’s musings are always intriguing and often enlightening, offering a glimpse of the anxious yet pleasing rationale of a mind struggling to live in a rational world. Fans of Will Self will enjoy this.

January 15, 2020
Drug binges, orgies, and techno...oh my! "For my purposes, a novel is simply a long chunk of prose in which whatever is said to have happened may or may not have actually happened, even if the author doesn't bother to change his own name." So, now that we've got that straight, we can plunge into the experiences of "Rob Doyle" during a 20-year-long Wanderjahr. Irish autofictionist Doyle's (This Is the Ritual, 2017, etc.) third book is a series of vignettes set in Sicily, Paris, Berlin, and beyond, framed by a series of letters to a friend, a woman also writing a book. His Geoff Dyer-esque lack of delusion about himself and his quest makes his report reliably refreshing. In Sicily, surrounded by beautiful women, he is so undone by sexual frustration that he finds relief at the farmers market. "I had the sense, eating those olives that were so plump and juicy that the eating of them was a rapturous, almost a sexual, experience, that I had never really eaten olives before, that the puny, meagre, olive-shaped things I'd bought in jars in Ireland were not so much olives as insults to olives, shameful betrayals of the olive experience." In Kashmir, he isolates himself on a houseboat in order to scientifically study the effects of ketamine. "I imagined I was conducting important research at the limits of consciousness, but I see now I was just getting fucked up on a boat." In Berlin, he dances all night at an immense sex club where "every freak in Europe had apparently converged." As necessary as eating or laughing, dancing gives him "access to a state of unselfconsciousness. There was always someone older or younger, nakeder or weirder than you...." So is he writing "the great backpacker dropout novel" or "the great Berlin techno novel? he wonders. Whatever it is, it provides one of the wildest experiences you can have without regrets or hangovers. If you long for your misspent youth--or didn't have one--here you go.

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March 1, 2020
Beginning in Dublin, Doyle's second novel (Here are the Young Men, 2014), follows writer Rob across the globe as he explores art, literature, his sexual appetites, and the mind-altering experiences of numerous drugs. He is ashamed of his desires, unsure of what he wants from life, and drifts aimlessly from city to city. As he travels from Paris to Sicily, San Francisco, and Berlin, he writes elegantly and powerfully about numerous writers and thinkers. Moreover, he involves himself in many contemporary art circles, as well as psychoactive endeavors. Each section of the novel is set in a single location. Rob's experiences on the Berlin club scene are brilliantly depraved, and the final chapter on DMT is funny, shocking, and deeply thought-provoking. Written in an almost resigned style, Doyle's self-portrait of a writer brings to mind the struggling young writer protagonists in Ben Lerner's Leaving the Atocha Station (2014) and Sheila Heti's fiction. Written in lyrical prose that often masks the bleakness of his narrator's worldview, this tragicomic, introspective, and philosophical work beautifully explores the limits of our understanding.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)