Thresholds

Thresholds is a novel which like Dante's Divine Comedy, follows the journey of a man at the mid point in his life as he travels through the landscape of Rome on the last day of the twentieth century. Preoccupied with issues of the past and the future, Wayne Janus, an American executive of an Italian-owned international corporation, assesses the course of his personal life, speculates about the beginning of the twentieth century as it was viewed by his respective grandfathers and engages in a flirtation with an attractive international student who he brings as his guest to a celebration to welcome the new millennium. Throughout the day, the path of this visitor in The Eternal City is crossed by numerous people whose individual stories are woven into the tapestry of the narrative. An aged, former Italian futurist turned fascist, a young waiter and his married lover, an Italian businessman and his pregnant mistress, and a self-appointed street prophet, offer a compounding parallax of points of view that, like an abstract painting, brings each of their figures to the surface of this work and shows the connection between every man and the history that surrounds him.