Cost by Roxana Robinson

From the Publisher

THE LUMINOUS AND GRIPPING NEW NOVEL FROM “ONE OF OUR BEST WRITERS” (JONATHAN YARDLEY, THE WASHINGTON POST)

When Julia Lambert, an art professor, settles into her idyllic Maine house for the summer, she plans to spend the time tending her fragile relationships with her father, a repressive neurosurgeon, and her gentle mother, who is descending into Alzheimer’s. But a shattering revelation intrudes: Julia’s son Jack has spiraled into heroin addiction.

In an attempt to save him, Julia marshals help from her looseknit clan: elderly parents; remarried ex-husband; removed sister; and combative eldest son. Ultimately, heroin courses through the characters’ lives with an impersonal and devastating energy, sweeping the family into a world in which deceit, crime, and fear are part of daily life.

Roxana Robinson is the author of Sweetwater, which Booklist called a “hold-your-breath novel of loss and love.” Billy Collins praised Robinson as “a master at moving from the art of description to the work of excavating the truths about ourselves.”

In Cost, Robinson tackles addiction and explores its effects on the bonds of family, dazzling us with her hallmark subtlety and precision in evoking the emotional interiors of her characters. The result is a work in which the reader’s sense of discovery and compassion for every character remains unflagging to the end, even as the reader, like the characters, is caught up in Cost’s breathtaking pace.

The New York Times - Leah Hager Cohen

Robinson has been perennially and somewhat reductively tagged a chronicler of WASP life. This designation, while factually accurate—as is the observation that her stories regularly address parenting and marital issues—doesn't do her justice. These subjects—WASP life, domestic life—are often used as code for "small," in the sense of both trivial and mean, and Robinson's fiction is neither. In writing about characters whose lives are constrained, she makes them loom largeCost is unusual for being as plot-driven as it is character-driven, and the assured manner in which Robinson builds toward the inevitable train wreck is matched by her acuity in bringing us inside the characters' minds.

Publishers Weekly

Julia Lambert is a New York art professor spending the summer in Maine with her elderly father, a domineering neurosurgeon, and mother, a gentle soul succumbing to Alzheimer's. Julia's oldest son, Steven, joins the clan as tragic news surfaces: her second son, Jack, is addicted to heroin. Ex-husband Wendell, Julia's distant sister Harriet and Jack himself soon arrive, and intervention is on the agenda. Jack refuses to go quietly, and Robinson, who has worked in multiple genres (including penning a biography of Georgia O'Keeffe), engulfs the clan in a sea of resentment and repressed hostility, spiked with the intermittent need to feel close. Her unrelenting look at the deep physical and mental distress involved in heroin abuse is not for the faint of heart, with key portions of the drama unfolding through descriptions of Jack's perpetually itching skin, twitching muscles, heaving stomach, needle-tracked arms and addled brain. While the omniscient narration sometimes loses focus, Robinson offers adept closeups of family trauma. (June)

Beth E. Andersen - Library Journal

The mildly strained Lambert family is in terrible trouble. New York art professor Julia is spending the summer in her ramshackle Maine home with her very elderly parents. Julia's older son, Steven, arrives for a visit and shatters the surface serenity with his suspicion that his younger brother, Jack, is a heroin addict spiraling out of control. When Steve's worst fears are confirmed, Julia's ex-husband, Wendell, brings Jack to Maine for an intervention, conducted by Ralph Carpenter, a tough ex-addict who runs a Florida recovery program. Robinson's fourth novel (after Sweetwater) spares her fictional family nothing in this tale of hell. Each of the Lamberts is forced to look down the wrong end of the heroin needle, one horrific, sordid, heartbreaking detail after another. With exquisitely raw honesty, Robinson offers no hope for this nearly always-deadly addiction. As Jack's descent picks up speed toward the end, the Lamberts are drowning in the kind of intolerable grief borne of having to mourn the loss of a loved one before the heart stops beating. Highly recommended.

Kirkus Reviews

Robinson (A Perfect Stranger: And Other Stories, 2005, etc.) offers the unrelentingly pessimistic story of a woman coming to grips with her son's heroin addiction. Julia, a divorced artist and art professor in Manhattan, has two grown sons: responsible Steven, who has been working as a conservation activist in Seattle but is returning east to attend law school, and his younger brother Jack, an erstwhile musician who has always been the family risk-taker and troublemaker. The novel opens on the glum scene of Julia attempting to entertain her difficult, aging parents at her Maine vacation house. Already tense from trying to be a dutiful daughter despite her resentment toward her rigid father Edward and her impatience with her placid mother Katharine, who is actually losing her memory, Julia falls to pieces when Steven arrives and admits his suspicion that Jack has become a heroin addict. She immediately calls her ex-husband Wendell who goes to Jack's squalid apartment and drags him to Maine for a family intervention including distraught Edward and clueless Katharine. Before any real conversation can take place, Jack goes into withdrawal. A desperate Wendell calls 911, and Jack is hospitalized. The family now rally around professional interventionist Ralph Carpenter, who arrives shortly before Jack, having escaped from the hospital, is arrested while attempting to rob a drug store. After Julia unwisely puts up her cottage as security that Jack will show up for his trial, he is allowed to enter Ralph's rehab program in Florida. At first Julia remains in partial denial, unable to grasp how grave Jack's condition is, but the "hypnotic and dreadful" Ralph gives Julia and readers a full course inthe horrors and hopelessness of heroin addiction, so no one is surprised when Jack shoots up and is kicked out of the rehab program Ralph runs. Meanwhile, family dynamics are deeply affected for better and worse until Jack hits the inevitable bottom. A fictional case study, at once pedantic and riveting. Agent: Lynn Nesbit/Janklow & Nesbit

What People Are Saying

Cost is stunning. Each of the characters is so perfectly realized, each is made known to us with such heart and intelligence. This is a very big book: the territory of family is more fragile and dangerous than any geography we know, and Roxana Robinson has made life of that. I loved, admired, and was frankly undone by every minute of it. --Susan Richards Shreve, author of A Student of Living Things

Roxana Robinson is surely one of the most graceful stylists and psychologically perceptive writers working.… Cost approaches the subject of drugs' impact from an original and very significant angle. This book shows further the extent of Robinson's insights into the whirl, the generational ironies at work, and the desperate indulgences to which we turn in our confusion. Cost is an important, timely book that furthers insight into our present fortunes and dilemmas. --Robert Stone, author of Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties

Cost is a gritty portrait of the havoc wreaked upon a family by one member's drug addiction. Roxana Robinson's vivid, sensuous prose moves effortlessly among relationships and points of view, evoking a brutal war between familial love -- in its infinite power and mystery -- and the mechanical devastations of pathology. --Jennifer Egan, author of The Keep

With passion, feeling, and a keen eye for detail, Roxana Robinson brings chillingly to life a family and a family tragedy, showing us how-like a luminous yet ominous landscape -- their tangible visible world can coincide with the invisible, tumultuous world of their emotions. --Lily Tuck, author of The News from Paraguay

Product Details

• ISBN: 0374271879
  
• ISBN-13: 9780374271879
• Format: Hardcover, 432pp
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Pub. Date: June 2008
• Sales Rank: 3,138

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