Cost: A Novel [Hardcover]

Roxana Robinson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 10, 2008

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.

Editorial Reviews

From 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)
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From The New Yorker

Robinson’s fourth novel is an engrossing tale of a patrician family’s unravelling during a summer in Maine. Julia Lambert is a divorced artist, trying to entertain her oppressive, former neurosurgeon father (he points out everything that’s wrong with his daughter’s run-down cabin) and her self-effacing mother, who is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Julia’s elder son suspects that his younger brother, Jack, is a heroin addict, and when this turns out to be true an intervention is staged. The family’s ugly, dysfunctional history pours out in the process, in sharp contrast with the halcyon setting. Robinson moves nimbly among the numerous characters’ mind-sets, and although Julia’s meditations on "the long tradition of luminist painting" can drag, Jack’s story maintains its tension until the final, affecting pages.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (June 10, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374271879
• ISBN-13: 978-0374271879
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #388,210 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A harrowing story of drug addiction..., June 18, 2008

By 

Jill Meyer (United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Cost: A Novel (Hardcover)

Roxanna Robinson - always a brilliant writer - takes the reader through the devastating emotional effect that heroin addiction brings to an entire family, as well as the physical effects it has on the addict. Not one member of 22- year old Jack's immediate family is spared the damage stemming from his drug addiction. Robinson bases most of the story on Jack, his divorced parents Julia and Wendell, and his older brother, Steven. But, she brings in other family members and some others outside the family, who have been pulled into the problems Jack has created by his addiction.

This is the story of a family - three generations - who have long been separated emotionally by misunderstandings. They are brought together in an attempt to deal with Jack's problems and in the process find some emotional healing with each other.

It is a great read. Robinson is unstinting in describing the family's turmoil and the book doesn't end in a wholly happy way, but it ends the way most things like this probably do end in "real life".

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Cost of Connections, August 1, 2008

By 

Jill I. Shtulman (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Cost: A Novel (Hardcover)

This book rises far above the usual tragedy genre; it delves into the true cost of an addiction on parents, sibling, and extended family and it doesn't strike one false note. It's a true page-turner and by the end of the book, you'll feel as if you know each of these characters intimately as if they were flesh-and-blood neighbors. That's rare praise for a work of fiction.

COST presents the point of view of each character individually: Julia, the very human divorced mother, her ex-husband Wendell, her neurosurgeon autocratic father, her memory-challenged mother, her conflicted older son Steven... and Jack, her heroin-addicted younger son who draws the entire clan into a web of fear, recriminations, and struggle for too-late connections.

Roxana Robinson doesn't flinch in describing the cost of addiction, nor does she preach. We, the readers, see the cost from all angles: what it does to the brain (through the eyes of the neurosurgeon grandfather), what it does to the body, and most of all, what it does to the soul. We learn that for most heroin addicts -- the vast majority -- rehab is only an illusion and death is the likely result. And we view how that knowledge affects the day-to-day lives of those most intimately involved.

Some pages are so devastating that they are painful to read; some strike notes of accord as we relate them to our own struggling family relationships and how "something in the blood makes them kin, keeps them apart."

It's a true tour de force presented with passion, compassion, perceptiveness, and an eagle eye for details. This should be required reading for every would-be drug user. And it certainly is recommended reading for each of us who love perfectly-realized characters in situations that are not of their making.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful and Wise, June 26, 2008

By 

Eileen Granfors (Santa Clarita, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Cost: A Novel (Hardcover)

I see that others have used the word "harrowing," which is exactly what I would call "Cost" as well. But reading it, through all the dangers and absolute dissolution that drugs do, can bring the reader enlightenment, grim as it may be.

"Cost" is a harrowing novel to read, not just because the focus is a heroin-addicted son.

Robinson clearly assesses the mindset of the two elderly parents, the two very different daughters, Julia and Harriet, and Julia's sons, Steven and Jack.

This is Jack's story. The picture of a heroin addict is excrutiating, and the family's pain is felt.

Julia's guilt and fear are matched by her egotistical father's awakening to the limitations of his own aging mind and body and his wife's gracious slip into dementia.

This dysfunctional family is probably not so different from that of many families where "father knows best," and no emotion is allowed to be shown or expressed. This is the first time I have read such a thorough and compelling assessment of growing up under those conditions.

An amazing book, but not an easy one to swallow.