Cost: A Novel
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*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. 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.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist

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) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Art professor Julia doesn't know it, but her life is about to plummet straight to hell. And you'll plummet with her when you discover that her offbeat younger son has become a heroin addict. Raw, pitch-dark, harrowingly frank-and absolutely astonishing. (LJ 4/1/08) (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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 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. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

*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. 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. Copyright 2008 Booklist Reviews.

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, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI

Art professor Julia doesn't know it, but her life is about to plummet straight to hell. And you'll plummet with her when you discover that her offbeat younger son has become a heroin addict. Raw, pitch-dark, harrowingly frank-and absolutely astonishing. (LJ 4/1/08) Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.

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)