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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, I'm very pleased to have us my guest, Rob Doyle, whose new novel Threshold is published by Bloomsbury Books.

I had the excitement of being introduced to Rob Doyle's work by a writer who lives in Los Angeles, where we taped Rachel Kushner. She was very excited about the book,

actually has a blurb on the back of it. She tells us that she forgets about how to read the novel

and what kind of novel it is, and instead to love the narrator

whose brilliance and humor on drugs and literature, sex and boredom and death, leave me in awe.

Now, what I find about Rob Doyle's book, Threshold, is that any question you ask about it has, at the very least, two opposing

answers.

It's one of the exciting things of the book.

So let's start out, Rob, among other things, the threshold of what?

I think you're right that it's a book of many dualities and many dichotomies.

And I would throw out just a few of them.

I would say it's the threshold between the known and the unknown,

the threshold between indeed the generic threshold between fiction and nonfiction, between narrative and

essay, but it's also the threshold of consciousness. And it's very, it's an intrepid kind of book.

...