By: Roxana Robinson Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Average Rating: Binding: Hardcover Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 432 Publication Date: June 10, 2008 Release 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.
Pretentious I started this book last night and got through about 16 pages before stopping in disgust. In the first 14 pages the author uses these words: obdurate, impecuniousness, crepuscular and aquiline. I'm fairly literate and I read voraciously, but those were new ones for me. Sure, the reader can pretty much discern the meaning of the words from their context, but still..... Perhaps the story is one of the greatest ever. I'll never know and that's OK with me.
400 Page Episode of "Intervention" This book didn't live up to the hypge that surrounded it when it came out, but it was still a very interesting read. Few authors inhabit the minds of their characters as intricately and realistically as Ms Robinson has here. I won't reveal any plot points (there is really only 1) but I'll just say that I felt a tremendous sense of waste when it ended, both about the characters and the author. The book essentially puts a microscope on lives horribly mis-spent and it is both fascinating and crushingly depressing to peer down upon them. You can't not ask if you, too, are throwing away your years--maybe already threw them away and didn't know it. For this, I'm actually thankful to the author. The book woke me up and made me think about how I spend my time, how I interact with my family, what they think of me when I'm not with them. The second sense of waste I felt relates to the author's talents. If her ambition matched her skills, this would have been a completely different and better book--perhaps this book wouldn't have existed at all. She is capable of a sprawlingly complex novel and I hope she writes it--next.
Very disappointed Loved the chapter I read online. Just hugely disappointed when I read the book and can't understand why everyone is so excited about it. It is filled with false starts and stupid mistakes you don't know weather to kick the author for or the characters.
Got significantly better in the last chapter I picked up Cost after a great review in the Washington Post. Until the last chapter I was underwhelmed. Roxana Robinson's writing is good, but in my opinion, has a tendency to be overcooked. On about 10 occasions I found myself speed reading through sections of the book because they were just too drawn out (the boat rescue as an example). In other areas, however, I savored the writing and would re-read a sentence or paragraph because it was so well wrought.
I did not like the characters. They were not particularly interesting or complex to me. I found them dull and unlikable. Even the most developed mother, Julia, fell short of being either complex or likeable (pitiful, yes). As an artist and college professor, I would think some of Julia's dialogue would be more sophisticated, intelligent, emotionally nuanced. Instead, a lot of what she said and thought seemed so juvenile to me. The hard-headed dictatorial father, the soft and cheery mother, the aloof and chilly sister, the tree-hugging tormented brother were all stereotypical.
In all, I was disppointed in the characters because I guess they all seemed like characters I could have come up with if I had written a book myself. I love to read to see and marvel at writers' varied and amazing creativity that is so much beyond my own. In this regard, the book disappointed.
(SPOILER ALERT) Because of the poignancy of the last chapter, however, I added 2 stars to what would otherwise be a one star review for me. In the last chapter, the focus shifted from the story of trying to get Jack into rehab, to after he's gone into rehab, told from his mother Julia's point of view. I loved the way the author made the shift, very softly. I also loved the unexpected emotions of Julia. Tormented by Jack's failure in rehab and halfway houses (alluded to but thankfully not belabored much), Julia never knows where Jack is, has long since lost all trust of him, and realizes that he is beyond help. She is in a slow and never-ending torture of worry and torment. The only relief from this she has is Jack's ultimate death. The author wrote and handled the last chapter absolutely equisitely. This was a nice ending salvage for an otherwise so-so book.
The jacket painting is beautiful.
The Cost of Connections 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.
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