Threshold

by Rob Doyle Narrated by Alan Smyth

Overview

"Threshold, or, how I learned to stop worrying (about what sort of novel this is) and love the narrator, whose brilliance and humor on drugs and literature, sex and boredom and death, leave me in awe." -Rachel Kushner

"Fearless and challenging, inventive and compulsive, unique and utterly heartfelt." -John Boyne

"Daring and deranged, endlessly entertaining, furiously funny." -Geoff Dyer

"Playful, potent, lurid, moving, and fearless." -Lisa McInerney

"[A] modern day odyssey." -Teddy Wayne

"A Pilgrim's Progress for our time." -Mike McCormack

"A thrilling mutation . . . [Doyle's] is a journey you don't want to miss."-Chris Power

An uninhibited portrait of the artist as a perpetual drifter and truth-seeker--a funny, profound, compulsive read that's like traveling with your wildest and most philosophical friend.

The narrator of Rob Doyle's Threshold has spent the last two decades traveling, writing, and imbibing drugs and literature in equal measure, funded by brief periods of employment or "on the dole" in Dublin. Now, stranded between reckless youth and middle age, his travels to far-flung places have acquired a de facto purpose: to aid the contemporary artist's search for universal truth.

Following Doyle from Buddhism to the brink of madness, Threshold immerses us in the club-drug communalism of the Berlin underworld, the graves of myth-chasing artists in Paris, and the shattering and world-rebuilding revelations brought on by the psychedelic DMT, the so-called "spirit molecule."

Exulting in the rootlessness of the wanderer, Doyle exists in a lineage of writer-characters-W. G. Sebald, Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, and Rachel Cusk-deftly and subversively exploring forms between theory and autobiography. Insightful and provocative, Threshold is a darkly funny, genuinely optimistic, compulsively readable celebration of perception and desire, of what is here and what is beyond our comprehension.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times - Parul Sehgal

…game and gleefully provocative. Threshold, a nettlesome new novel—surly, ambitious, frequently annoying—has been my treasured companion of late.

Publishers Weekly

11/25/2019

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. (Mar.)

From the Publisher

"When it comes to reading in an emergency . . . comfort seems to be the order of the day — old favorites, regressive pleasures, cozy classics. I am here to champion the opposite: the enlivening, more absorbing distractions of disagreement . . . ; 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." - New York Times

"Confidently told . . . 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." - Library Journal (starred review)

"[Threshold] 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." - Kirkus Reviews

"Rob Doyle . . . is following in the footsteps of his countryman James Joyce by refusing to repeat himself and by pushing his genius beyond ordinary boundaries . . . The book is funny and scary and profoundly compelling . . . Like some 21st century Hemingway with an Irish accent, Doyle is living it up to write it down." - New York Journal of Books

"Written in lyrical prose . . . this tragicomic, introspective, and philosophical work beautifully explores the limits of our understanding." - Booklist

"His best book so far: riddling, irreverent and fearless." - Times Literary Supplement

"A wild, sleazy, drug-filled odyssey . . . Doyle’s maverick novel deserves the accolades coming its way." - Independent

"Dark, misanthropic, provocative; Doyle’s writing really ‘goes there,’ and emerges triumphant." - Irish Times

"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." - Publishers Weekly

"The Great Modern Drug Novel . . . Threshold innovatively merges the first-person intimacy of memoir, journalistic research, and the deathless hedonism of untethered youth—with a light touch. . . . In our new reality of high indoors, we look to books to take us somewhere. Threshold takes us everywhere." - Inside Hook

"If this blurb were a movie title it would go like this: Threshold, or, how I learned to stop worrying (about what sort of novel this is) and love the narrator, whose brilliance and humor on drugs and literature, sex and boredom and death, leave me in awe." - Rachel Kushner, Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of THE MARS ROOM

"Threshold is extraordinary, quite unlike anything I’ve read before. It’s intimate, a revelation in the literal sense of that word, and yet it’s full of curiosity. It’s hit me right in the gut, made me think about my own life and the things that I’ve done in it. It’s fearless and challenging, inventive and compulsive, unique and utterly heartfelt. A book that will stay with me for a very long time. Masterful." - John Boyne, author of THE HEART'S INVISIBLE FURIES

"The geographic and intellectual peregrinations of Threshold cover a great deal of terrain: tripping (both the drug and day variety), vast swathes of Europe, reading, loneliness, sex. Rob Doyle’s portrait of the artist as a youngish man, filtered through the sieve of his refined prose, is the modern-day odyssey of a traveler who doesn’t quite have a home to return to except for the expansive vistas of his own roving mind." - Teddy Wayne, author of LONER

"Ecce homo! Threshold is audacious (never more so than when most abject), daring and deranged, endlessly entertaining, furiously funny and – to hurtle to the other end of the alphabet – wonderful. Above all, it’s a highly original attempt to engage, formally, with Nietzsche’s dangerous question: ‘how much truth can one mind [or novel] bear?’ " - Geoff Dyer, author of JEFF IN VENICE, DEATH IN VARANASI

"Rob Doyle has outdone himself. Threshold is one of those novels where underlining notable lines would be a very bad idea, as you'd absolutely mangle the paper . . . It's the kind of work you have to come down from—playful, potent, lurid, moving and fearless. I'm sure it'll be bouncing around my head for a long time yet." - Lisa McInerney, author of THE GLORIOUS HERESIES

"This is the type of brilliant, maverick achievement that sets a (young) writer apart. Wonderfully readable and with a skein of black comedy running through it that serves to highlight the seriousness of Doyle’s intent. A Pilgrim's Progress for our time." - Mike McCormack, author of the Booker Prize-longlisted SOLAR BONES

"Threshold is Rob Doyle's best book yet, a thrilling mutation somewhere between novel, essay collection, report, travelogue and confession. Doyle is a Romantic wandering in the post-sublime, a zealot without a cause, and his is a journey you don't want to miss." - Chris Power, author of MOTHERS

"Threshold is about inhabiting the space between the mundane and the sublime . . . Transcendence can certainly be found in things like magic mushrooms . . . but it also be found in love and language, which are themselves gateways and thresholds. This marvelous book knows that and leads us toward them." - Irish Central Review

Library Journal

★ 10/01/2019

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

Kirkus Reviews

2019-12-23
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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172857270
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	03/31/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

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