The author and critic reveals his weakness for lugubrious writers in this mischievous, enthusiastic guide to his favourite books, interspersed with reflections on his druggy youth In 2019, when he was living in Berlin, the Irish author Rob Doyle wrote a short weekly column about his favourite books for the _Irish Times_. The series began with _The Unwomanly Face of War_, Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history of Soviet war widows, and ended, 51 books later, with _The Colossus of Maroussi_, Henry Miller’s Greek travel memoir of 1941. In between came, well, everything, from Virginia Woolf to Virginie Despentes, via Carl Jung, Philip K Dick and _The Tibetan Book of the Dead_, each introduced with unstuffy critical acuity and lapel-grabbing comic hyperbole: “Is it preposterous to suggest that Fyodor Dostoevsky prophesied the election of Donald Trump, Brexit and the seething hate-pits of social media?” Readers of Doyle’s autobiographical novel _Threshold_ won’t be shocked that these columns, collected in his new book, fall hardest for writers mischievously lugubrious in outlook – Michel Houellebecq, say, or the Romanian author EM Cioran. Freud’s _Civilization and Its Discontents_ gets a thumbs-up for its “honest theoretical acknowledgment of the unbridled aggression, depravity and lust for annihilation that constitute the dirtiest secret of the individual in society”, while Nietzsche’s _On the Genealogy of Morals_ “might be one of the greatest horror novels ever written”; Joris-Karl Huysmans’s _À rebours_, “a kind of 19th-century _American Psycho_” about a sickly aristocrat’s outré self-help programme, which Doyle read while tripping on psychoactive cacti in Bolivia, is plain “evil”. Inserted between these snippets of high-grade consumer advice are longer, looser reflections written upon Doyle’s return to Ireland early in 2020, a visit that became a long-term stay on account of you know what. Thus does the book morph into a Covid-era tour of Doyle’s psyche, as he reflects while stuck at home on a roving youth spent in druggy squats and house shares in London and Paris, bumming around Asia and Latin America with the cash earned from sorting supermarket coupons on a Dublin industrial estate. Uppermost on his mind is sex, relegated by the pandemic to a memory, save for half-hearted clicks on PornHub (“like a nightmarish roam through an infinite wet market”), to say nothing of a lockdown-breaking “amatory visit” to his girlfriend. Amid moist-eyed recollections of a three-way at a Berlin nightclub or the Vietnamese lover he followed to San Francisco, we’re told how Doyle didn’t attempt to be faithful, even in a serious relationship. In the darkest days of 2020, he lost his nerve while drafting a tongue-in-cheek Facebook post that he feared his friends might take seriously, because it actually wasn’t wholly light-hearted: “If there’s a silver lining to all this, it’s that the new generation won’t get to enjoy the freedoms I made such a beast of myself exploiting.” Doyle’s self-guying impulses make him good company on the page. When he imagines writing a book such as Thomas Bernhard’s _My Prizes_, in which the Austrian writer recalls his experience of accepting various awards (Doyle’s version would be made up of “acerbic speeches to mark the literary prizes I did _not_ win”), the ensuing rant about “some schmoozing chump win[ning] the latest popularity contest with her bullshit book” is funny, not only bitter, in part because Doyle recognises he’s no outsider. He talks of an ex-lover who is a lauded French novelist and says Geoff Dyer (a heavy influence) still texts him about an epic night out they once shared; Rachel Kushner told him that, inspired by an idea about a Houellebecq scholar he gave up after 10,000 words, she’s going to make the French writer a character in her forthcoming novel. Continue reading...
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