Cost
Roxana Robinson, 2008
Macmillan Picador
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312428464
Summary
Julia Lambert, an artist, is spending the summer in her old Maine farmhouse. During a visit from her elderly parents, she hopes to mend complicated relationships with her domineering father, a retired neurosurgeon, and her gentle mother, who is descending into the fog of Alzheimer's.
But a shattering revelation intrudes: Julia's son, Jack, has spiraled into heroin addiction. In her attempts to save him, Julia marshals help from her loosely knit clan, but Jack's addiction courses through the family with a devastating energy, sweeping them all into a world of confusion, fear, and obsession. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Pine Mountain, Kentucky, USA
• Raised—New Hope, Pennsylvania
• Education—B.A., University of Michigan
• Currently—lives in New York City
Roxana Robinson is an American novelist and biographer whose fiction explores the complexity of familial bonds and fault lines. Her 2013 novel, Sparta, was published to wide acclaim, and her 2008 novel, Cost, was named one of the Five Best Novels of the Year by the Washington Post. She is also the author of Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life, and has written widely on American art and issues pertaining to ecology and the environment.
Life and Work
Robinson was born in Pine Mountain, Kentucky, and raised in New Hope, Pennsylvania, the child of educators and the great-great-granddaughter of social reformer Henry Ward Beecher. She graduated from Buckingham Friends School, in Lahaska, and from The Shipley School, in Bryn Mawr. She studied writing at Bennington College with Bernard Malamud and received a B.A. degree in English Literature from the University of Michigan. She worked in the American painting department at Sotheby's and wrote about American art until she began to successfully publish short fiction in the 1980s.
Equally skilled in both long and short form fiction, Robinson is the author of several novels, three story collections and a biography. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Atlantic, and Best American Short Stories, and been widely anthologized and broadcast on National Public Radio. Four of her works have been chosen as Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times, and Cost won the Maine Fiction Award and was long-listed for the Dublin Impac Prize for Fiction. She was named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library, and currently serves on the board of PEN American Center and the Authors Guild. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Robinson has taught at Wesleyan University, the University of Houston and at the New School. Since 1997, she has taught at the Wesleyan Writers’ Conference, and is currently teaching in the Hunter College MFA Program.
Robinson is also a biographer and scholar of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American art. Her articles have appeared in Arts, ARTnews, and Art & Antiques, as well as in exhibition catalogues for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Katonah Museum of Art and others. Her biography of Georgia O'Keeffe was deemed by Calvin Tomkins, of The New Yorker, "without question the best book written about O'Keeffe,” and named a New York Times Notable Book. Robinson lectures frequently on Georgia O'Keeffe, and appeared in the BBC documentary on the artist.
She reviews books for the New York Times and Washington Post, and her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Harper's, Vogue, Real Simple, and More. She has also written about travel for the New York Times, Travel and Leisure, and elsewhere.
Robinson is passionate about environmental concerns, explored in her novel Sweetwater, and has published numerous op-eds in the Boston Globe, International Herald Tribune, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. She has also been a guest blogger for the National Resource Defense Council. She also writes about gardening for publications such as House and Garden, Horticulture, and Fine Gardening. Her garden is listed in the Garden Conservancy Open Days, and has been written about in the New York Times, House and Garden, Traditional Homes, Atlantic, and Gardens Illustrated. She serves on the council of the Maine Coast Heritage Trust, which promotes the conservation of natural places statewide.
She lives in New York, Maine and Connecticut with her husband. Her daughter is a painter whose work appeared on both the hardcover and paperback editions of Cost.
Critical Reception
Hailed as “one of our best writers” by Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post, and “John Cheever’s heir apparent” by the New York Times Book Review, Robinson has also been said, by Time, to be in the “august company” of Edith Wharton, Louis Auchincloss and Henry James.
With Cost, Robinson moved into a larger arena, and, as critic Ron Charles of the Washington Post has said, she “has crept into corners of human experience [that] each of us is terrified to approach ... the implacable tragedies that shred our sense of how the world should work.” In a New York Times interview on the extensive research she did, Robinson said, “Cost has a larger reach than my previous books, both in terms of emotional risk and experience. Alzheimer's and heroin addiction are things I found both very threatening and compelling. They seemed like things I needed to explore."
Spotlighted for her short fiction in the New York Times Book Review, Robinson compared writing a story to
like doing a cliff dive, the kind that only works when the wave hits just right. You stand on top, poised and fearful, looking at what lies below: you must start your dive when the wave has withdrawn, and there's nothing beneath you but sand and stone. You take a deep breath and throw yourself over, hoping that, by the time you hit, the wave will be back, wild and churning, and full of boiling energy. It's kind of terrifying. It's unbelievably fun.
Robinson has written introductions to The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, A Matter of Prejudice and Other Stories by Kate Chopin, and a forthcoming edition of the English novelist Elizabeth Taylor's A Game of Hide and Seek. She edited and wrote the introduction to The New York Stories of Edith Wharton, published by NYRB Classics, as well the introduction to Wharton’s The Old Maid: The Fifties, published by Modern Library Classics. Robinson was also a guest on the recent WAMC/Northeast Public Radio program “American Icons,” on which she discussed House of Mirth. She is also on the Advisory Council at The Mount, Wharton’s historic home in Lenox, Massachusetts.
Commenting on her affinity with Wharton, Robinson notes,
Wharton and I come from similar backgrounds. I grew up with the rules that governed her: emotions were to be strictly controlled, pain was not to be acknowledged, and the rules of decorum were to be obeyed. I’ve always been fascinated by her unblinking exegesis of all this, the way you are when someone breaks the rules, the way you are when you read something and think, “What? Are you allowed to write about this?” Wharton wrote about her world in a way that made it possible for me – and for all of us who come after her—to go into our own worlds still further, and to tease out the innermost reaches of pain and passion from the decorous woven fabric of our lives.
Her work is increasingly used for teaching purposes, and the University of Connecticut has taught a course called, “The Works of Roxana Robinson.”A. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/26/2013.)
Book Reviews
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 large. 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.
Leah Hager Cohen - New York Times
Cost is unsparing but not bleak. There is urgency in the narrative; you keep hoping for a rescue and you care about these complex people even when you want to shake them for behaving badly. There is bitter humor in the family's uneasy alliance with the rehab counselor. You could learn a lot from this novel about the family dynamics of addiction. But what makes Ms. Robinson much more than a very good reporter is her searching compassion for these flawed people.... Cost is both lyrical and unsentimental, richly honest and humane--summer reading of uncommon stature.
Wall Street Journal
Loss, grief and regret are the central subjects of Roxana Robinson's harrowing new novel, which applies the writer's trademark gifts as an intelligent, sensitive analyst of family life to the darkest subject matter she has tackled to date.... Robinson achieves a truly Shakespearean breadth of vision in this final scene, acknowledging that suffering can sharpen our understanding without minimizing the lasting damage it inflicts. Bleak though it undeniably is, Cost is also a warmly human and deeply satisfying book, marking a new level of ambition and achievement for this talented author.
Chicago Tribune
Gripping...Robinson paints a chilling portrait of addiction, depicting heroin junkies in particular as ruthless in pursuit of their highs and rehab as hardly more than a crapshoot. There's little solace here, except in the accumulation of wisdom and softening of old resentments at the book's appealing, astutely drawn characters come together. We can't always save each other, but there's a kind of redemption in the fight.
People
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.
Publishers Weekly
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.
Beth E. Andersen - Library Journal
Robinson 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 in the 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.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the novel's title. What are the many costs—emotional and material—associated with Jack's addiction? What other circumstances lead the characters to consider their self-worth, or the "worth" of others?
2. How does Julia's relationship with her sister compare with Steven's relationship with his brother? What leads siblings to become estranged despite having been close during childhood?
3. What does the house in Maine represent to Julia at various points in her life? How does the house set the tone for the novel: picturesque, laden with memories, and in need of repair?
4. What does Cost tell us about the nature of marriage? What enabled Edward and Katharine to sustain their marriage? How does Wendell justify his affair? Is Harriet wise to avoid marriage, pursuing long-term relationships instead?
5. What are the repercussions of the parenting styles presented in the novel? Was Julia harmed by Edward's judgmental nature? To what extent was Jack's life a response to the way he perceived his parents?
6. Does Carpenter change Julia's family, or are they unaffected by his talk of loving interactions? What is captured in the moment when Edward mentally corrects Carpenter, asserting that addiction is not an illness (chapter twenty-seven)? Does Edward have different standards for the ill? Where does he believe self-determination ends and nature begins?
7. Steven is haunted by his parents' infidelity. Why does he blame his mother more easily than his father? How do Julia's memories of Eric shape the way she sees herself?
8. What accounts for the difference between Jack and Steven, who uses his rebellion for noble causes (such as protesting against loggers)? Would Steven have been an achiever if his brother had not been so troubled?
9. What portraits of the mind are offered in Cost? How does Edward feel about his memories of being a pioneering surgeon? What remains of Katherine despite her fading memory? What realities does each character create in the face of a disorienting world?
10. In chapter thirty-two, Julia tells Jack that he has to try harder. Is Julia naïve or simply afraid of what lies in store for her son? How do the other members of the family respond to both the psychological and the neurological fallout of his addiction? Why is it easier for Julia to acknowledge her parents' faltering health, while Harriet wants to believe that they are just fine?
11. What aspects of Julia's life emerge during her gallery opening? What is the significance of Harriet's presence there?
12. What were you thinking as you read the novel's closing scenes? Which characters had changed the most, along with your impressions of them?
13. How would you and your family have responded to a situation like Jack's? What do you believe can or should be done to address the needs of those with such severe addictions?
14. What themes are woven throughout this and other novels and stories by Roxana Robinson? What is unique about the approach she uses in bringing Julia's situation to life?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
top of page (summary)