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"Cost 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. . . .[Julia] gains the strength not only to bear a grievous separation from her younger son but, more significant, to question the separations she has imposed on the most intimate relationships in her life. Why, she wonders, has she done this? . . . Robinson has already shown us why, having exhumed the many reasons in the preceding pages. But the question remains worth asking, not only by Julia but by any of these characters—by anyone, period, still struggling to connect. With the novel's final words, which made me catch my breath, Robinson suggests the enormous stakes involved in pursuing the answer." —The New York Times Book Review, June 22.
Read entire review and the first chapter of Cost.
Booklist, starred review
“To choose beauty, to insist on it, this was a large gesture. Julia, an artist and divorced mother of two grown sons, inspires this perception in one of many transforming moments in this piercing novel of loss, in which choosing beauty (manifest in Robinson’s gorgeous prose) is crucial to survival. The author of Sweetwater (2003) and several short story collections, Robinson subtly conflates nature and human concerns as a crisis brings estranged family members together at Julia’s weathered home on the coast of Maine. Jack’ her younger son, has become addicted to heroin. His straight-arrow brother blames himself. Julia is in shock. Her neurosurgeon father, the source of much of the family’s angst, is secretly tormented by his exacting knowledge of what happens to the brain under the influence of opiates, and Alzheimer’s, which has begun its cruel assault on his lovely, stoic wife.
Longing and Belonging
A fragile family confronts the tragedy of addiction.
Reviewed by Ron Charles
The Washington Post
Sunday, July 6, 2008; Page BW07
COST
By Roxana Robinson
Cost will get tagged immediately as that story about heroin addiction, but what's best about Roxana Robinson's scarily good novel has nothing to do with opiates. Oh, she's done her homework well, and she writes about every aspect of the drug -- its use, its effects and especially its personal, financial and spiritual costs -- with flesh-itching precision. But if heroin is what gives this novel its rush, Robinson's sensitivity to family relations is what makes it so compelling.
Most of the story takes place at a seaside house in Maine. For Julia, an artist and art professor, this was meant to be a tranquil vacation with her elderly parents, but those plans are quickly swept aside. On his way home from Seattle, her elder son, Steven, stops in Brooklyn to see his younger brother, Jack. Immediately, he realizes something is wrong. Drugs had always been part of Jack's life, but now "he looked terrible; pale, very thin. Dark stubble stood out against his white skin. . . . Jack's presence seemed dead, flattened. No light came from him, the air around him was inert." When Steven arrives at his mother's house, he reluctantly tells her what he suspects. Julia calls her ex-husband, who brings Jack to the house in Maine, and together the whole family begins a faltering, panicked process of intervention, counseling and treatment that absorbs all their lives.
Read the complete review.
Ron Charles is a senior editor of Book World. He can be reached at charlesr@washpost.com.
"Cost is...an account of a perfect human storm that leaves a terrible wake. It's also impossible to put down, its bleakness relieved by Robinson's elegant, restrained prose and breakneck pacing. This is simply one of the most heart-wrenching and powerful novels I have ever read."
Down East Magazine
"Cost is both lyrical and unsentimental, richly honest and humane -- summer reading of uncommon stature."
–The Wall Street Journal
Robinson has always been a sensitive and revelatory writer, but she attains new degrees of intensity here in her scorching depictions of the nightmare world of addiction. Her illuminations of the churning inner lives of her smart and deep feeling characters depict good people facing brutal forces beyond the reach of reason or love.” – Donna Seaman
"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 preset fortunes and dilemmas." —Robert Stone, author of Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties
"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
"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
"Roxana Robinson's Cost artfully portrtays a family transformed by the far-reaching consequences of a son's heroin addiction." Vanity Fair
"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
A Spring 2008 “Recommended Reads” choice of the National Book Critics Circle.
Jun 2008. 420 p. Farrar/Sarah Crichton, hardcover, $25.00. (9780374271879).