‘Threshold’ Resurrects the Angry, Ambitious Young Man

Books of The Times When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. 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 (et tu, Wodehouse?

), 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. Zachary Leader’s biography of Saul Bellow contained the indelible fact that one of Bellow’s trusty modes of seduction was to read aloud to women from his own work for hours at a time (horrified italics mine). It’s the sort of detail that can inspire smug pity for the past: Who would attempt such a gesture now?

What woman would tolerate it? I had yet to meet Rob Doyle. 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.

“The idea was that, by gaining access to the weirder potentialities of consciousness, my basic stance towards existence would be altered: shorn of the tedium and banality,” Rob tells us. “I hoped I could come to experience consciousness itself. ” Or at least shirk work for a long spell, and run from his roots: a charmless childhood in Ireland, which he depicts with characteristic delicacy as “a backwater of banal, misshapen people. ” Rob drifts, from Paris to Thailand, Croatia and Sicily.

He overdoses on ketamine in New Delhi and smokes DMT in Ireland, which inspires his most delirious visions. DMT is a psychedelic that condenses a six-hour ayahuasca trip into 10 mind-melting minutes. (“You can still be an atheist up to 40 milligrams,” Doyle writes. ) Every time his passport is stamped, a new girlfriend, another pliant, unnamed creature materializes at his side, endlessly willing to loiter with him at the graves of his literary heroes (the usual suspects: Cioran, Bataille) and let him drone on about his despair and indecision.