Is Rob Doyle ticking off the genres? Having given us an acclaimed novel in Here Are The Young Men, and a collection of scabrously dynamic stories in This Is The Ritual, he now turns his attention to that well-known form, the genre-defying book.
Threshold is described on Doyle’s website, and by enthusiastic readers like Rachel Kushner and Kevin Barry, as a novel, but if it is a novel it’s one that represents its author’s life in a determinedly unmediated way, like Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle or Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You.
It reads, in other words, like a memoir, albeit one in discrete essay-like scenes and with linking threads. Then again, wasn’t much of Doyle’s first two books inspired by his own experiences too? Better then, perhaps, to adopt Geoff Dyer’s comment: “I like writing stuff that is only an inch from life – but all of the art is in that inch.”
The thread uniting many sections of Threshold is what Doyle’s publishers call “the immemorial quest for transcendent meaning,” or what the rest of us might call “taking shitloads of drugs”. Starting with magic mushrooms and ending with the industrial-strength hallucinogen DMT, Doyle takes us and his digestive system through a magical mystery tour of mind expansion, or at least distraction.
He is interested in drugs for their psychedelic possibilities, so although mushrooms, DMT, ayahuasca and even “horse tranquiliser” ketamine are fair game, he primly notes at one point that “I never really knew anyone that had taken heroin”.
But the problem with trying to describe the effect of hallucinogenic drugs to anyone who isn’t also off their head is that it’s a solipsistic act, impossible to represent adequately. The non-shroomhead will come to dread every blithely confident appearance of the phrase “the next time I took magic mushrooms…”
In fact drugs are a symptom in this book rather than a condition: an example of Doyle’s “longing for an encounter with otherness, a seeking-out of astonishment for its own sake”.
Favourite descriptor
“Astonishment” is a favourite descriptor, the result of meeting “the mysterious, sublime, fantastical and shocking”, which he has also sought through literature, as anyone who read his excellent column last year in this paper will have seen. (For anyone who hasn’t an indicator of Doyle’s tastes is that his most heavily underlined book is E. M. Cioran’s The Trouble With Being Born.)
He also seeks astonishment through philosophy, with “its promise of astonishing flights of thought; shocking and dangerous ideas; a sense of vertigo; vistas of the sublime with madness and horror”.
But he also seeks it through his own literary work, which is apt given that in his view “there is nothing more self-indulgent than writing”. But here we find a fundamental conflict between his desires. The man whom a friend calls “Scorched Earth Rob, lives his life like a retreating Nazi” cannot write “the great Berlin techno novel” (about “a druggie who dances a lot”) by going out clubbing and sneaking into the toilets to make notes, as he describes himself doing here.
There is a mismatch between seeking to live one’s life at the threshold of experience while applying the discipline to sit down at your desk every day like a normie and write the damn thing.
Of course Doyle is whip-smart and self-aware and knows all this, as he puts it in one very Geoff Dyer-esque sentence, referring to “the abandoned books that didn’t get written while I was busy documenting the rapturous decline I underwent while I was failing to write them”.
But if he does struggle to commit to another novel then genre-defying work like Threshold will do very nicely to be going on with. As a memoir-in-essays it may not have the galvanic energy of Greg Baxter’s A Preparation for Death, or the self-deprecating wit of Dyer’s Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, but Doyle achieves something more refreshing: by the end of the book he feels like good company with all his contradictions, indulgences and battles against himself.
Identification
That sense of readerly identification is a mark of how we respond differently to writing that has the appearance of non-fiction – we treat it at face value and invest in it emotionally. What is the truth of Threshold: in the events it describes, or the way it expands our own experiences as readers, with its riffs on Bataille, Cioran and Beckett?
All I can say is it’s a measure of the way this book messes up your thinking that by the end I was no longer sure which report I was more appalled by: the moment when Doyle ejaculates over an attractive student’s work and then burns it in shame, or the bit where he and his friends settle in for an evening of magic mushrooms “with musical instruments in hand”.
Kids – just say no!
