... the great drug novel of our time ... crucially, his book is generous and honest as few contemporary fictions are these days ... Threshold innovatively merges the first-person intimacy of memoir, journalistic research, and the deathless hedonism of untethered youth—with a light touch ... Humor, psychic struggle, the world, and all those drugs. In our new reality of high indoors, we look to books to take us somewhere. Threshold takes us everywhere.
When it comes to reading in an emergency, in a moment of crisis and uncertainty, comfort seems to be the order of the day — old favorites, regressive pleasures, cozy classics ... What happens if they fail you? Mine have...so I am here to champion the opposite: the enlivening, more absorbing distractions of disagreement, argument and pure pique, of being profitably at odds with what you are reading; the deep diversion of a good, cleansing quarrel, especially with a book that is game and gleefully provocative. Threshold, a nettlesome new novel — surly, ambitious, frequently annoying — has been my treasured companion of late ... Rob — the loafer and the mope, the impressively successful Lothario and pretentious little troll — is the protagonist of this book, which could be called autofiction (the author is also named Rob Doyle), anti-woke polemic or obsessive riff. It isn’t much interested in classification — in fact, it would rather like to annihilate pointless distinctions outright, much like the character himself, who is on a fervent spiritual quest with the aid of acid, meditation, magic mushrooms and ayahuasca ... Are you wincing with irritation yet? Good; irritation is this narrator’s specialty. He’d like to be 'a hate figure, a Shylock,' but he wonders if he has the nerve ... Doyle enjoys poking fun at Doyle, his habit of making sure his books are stocked at various bookstores, his dour pomposity ... Large swaths of Threshold — the would-be writer making pilgrimage to the homes of his heroes, in order to do anything but write — feel beholden to Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer’s affectionate tribute to procrastination, via an attempted biography of D. H. Lawrence. Sections in which Rob haunts museums...feel heavily indebted to Ben Lerner’s novels ... At another point, it is one of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s most famous passages that is channeled as Rob scribbles in his notebook ... Still other scenes recall Milan Kundera.
...Threshold...takes the form of 11 freewheeling, pharmaceutically messy vignettes in which a not-so-young literary man roams far-flung locales; Dyer, whose praise for Doyle appears on the jacket, even has a walk-on part ... Narrated with an appealing blend of wide-eyed curiosity and no-bullshit scepticism, the episodic tale charts the 20s and 30s of a Dublin philosophy graduate, Rob (naturally), whose wanderlust stems partly from his fear that he won’t be able to pen a magnum opus in his childhood bedroom, although Ireland’s 2006 ban on the sale and possession of magic mushrooms has something to do with it too.The itinerant structure keeps things fresh, serving up increasingly wild scenarios ... There’s enough wriggle room to ensure we don’t get hung up on, say, whether Doyle really has pissed in a stranger’s mouth at a Berlin nightclub. But troubling our pieties is part of the point, in any case...
Beginning in Dublin, with a long encomium to the magic mushroom, Doyle opts for a flat, essayistic style reminiscent of Ben Lerner, rather than the hyperventilating register of his first book ... If the novel’s minor characters are never given the time to breathe, or develop, and the self-regarding narrative voice can sometimes be irksome, the moments of genuine humour compensate ... Like much recent autofiction, Threshold perhaps shouldn’t be so compellingly readable, especially given its core theme of drug-taking. Tell a trip, lose a reader, but Doyle’s writing does the opposite, with considerable panache. The novel ends with an exploration of DMT, 'the apex of psychedelic drugs … too weird and disturbing even for the open-minded hippy generation'. DMT’s effects take the narrator to the very edge of the ineffable – something Doyle also comes close to achieving for the reader in his boundary-nudging fiction.
Structured like a travelogue interspersed with epistolary fragments, Threshold is an autobiographical novel reminiscent of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station ... There are some colourful tales of debauchery...but the plot is secondary ... Inviting a stranger to come and live inside your head for some 350 pages is a risk: if you don’t keep them entertained, they may end up resenting the experience. There is, unfortunately, a rather dreary quality to much of Doyle’s psychic patter, which is littered with trite aperçus. These include musings on weather...and disquisitions on the attractiveness of French and Italian women ... The narrator’s self-indulgent ruminations on his waning virility are similarly tedious – think Michel Houellebecq minus the laughs ... unshackled from the constraints of conventional narrative, Doyle runs away with himself and leaves the reader behind ... Threshold’s sprawling listlessness is probably best enjoyed as deadpan satire – a cautionary tale of dissipation and drift; a masterclass in what not to do.
The first thing you do after reading a chapter of Threshold is carry out a search to check that this is a novel – or if it isn’t, what it is ... [Rob's] reminiscences of mysticism, psychedelia and excess, Buddhism, art and literature, are episodic and anecdotal. They sketch a lifelong gap year, during which he’s mostly been drunk, high, masturbating or all three at once ... Whatever else it is, Threshold is surely the record of a voyage – a book of experience in some quite old-fashioned, powerful sense. It’s replete with the indicators of retrospection, confession, autofiction. Some of the adventures leave the reader with a faint bad taste in the mouth. Possibly they’ve been designed to ... Sometimes [Rob] trolls the reader so expertly it works, sometimes so obviously it doesn’t; sometimes he seems to be effortlessly trolling himself ... When I closed the book I felt briefly buoyed up by it and then as if I’d been challenged to separate the genuine from the fabricated in a not entirely fair arena.
Rob Doyle’s new novel is a trip, in all manner of ways ... exhilarating and highly entertaining work ... Rob is an engaging companion. His tone is mostly rueful self-deprecation as the writer fails to write the books he should be writing. It’s colourful, scabrous, humorous and laced with arcane literary knowledge ... After a route march along the road of excess, Rob’s journey terminates in a palace of wisdom. Acid is not the answer, we learn, but DMT may well be.
[Doyle] is following in the footsteps of his countryman James Joyce by refusing to repeat himself and by pushing his genius beyond ordinary boundaries ... Autofiction for its own sake seems coy and depthless. Neither of those two words apply to Doyle. He is simply suis generis ... funny and scary and profoundly compelling—more so if it doesn’t hide behind the gossamer veil of autofiction ... Such a tale might seem sordid, but because Doyle writes with an unnerving candor and humor, it ends up feeling like collaboration among Kafka, Camus, and Mark Twain ... no matter how dark Doyle’s thoughts become or how perilous his behavior, he is always brutally honest, funny, and self-deprecating ... As readers we watch [Doyle] and listen to him, wide-eyed, holding our breath, with alternate looks of horror and amusement on our faces.
Doyle does a lucid little rustle through all the greatcoat-on-the-heath mugging and druggy catastrophizing that delusional young men go for. Threshold is a bright review of both the last century and of the utility of juvenile scorn ... For a book full of people getting absolutely faded, again and again, there’s very little Dutch courage or yo-ho-ho partying about the partying. Plenty of the binges end without comment or in tears ... This project is most appealing when Doyle hoists himself up onto the next shelf, the bit that comes after a youth spent in sulky isolation ... Shitting on people is for teens of all ages, and Doyle is drifting away from that.
The main problem about Rob Doyle's book is deciding whether it is a novel or an episodic essay on recreational drugs ... perhaps this is a novel and the author is just having a laugh. In the end you feel that Threshold is a collection of drunken, drug-induced ramblings, sometimes followed by copious effluxions of morning-after purges. 'What I write about other writers, other artists,' Rob says at one stage, 'I'm writing about myself, and when I write about myself, I'm writing about the universe.' If you can empathise with that conceit, there will be plenty for you because, polished prose notwithstanding, it is a tedious read.
Rob Doyle’s latest autofiction, Threshold, is an exuberant and druggy odyssey that combines globetrotting literary pilgrimage and, well, chemical tourism ... certainly, this volume isn’t short of lurid anecdotes that stick in the mind ... Threshold weaves together travel writing, black comedy, passing thoughts on literature, and a philosophical meditation on altered states, a la Huxley’s The Doors of Perception.
...[a] poignant tale ... Throughout, [the narrator] carries on lively, often humorous discussions with himself about identity that hover on the edge of chaotic existential crisis ... 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.
