How to get that monkey off his back is the drug addict’s existential challenge how to avoid the cliches of drug addiction is the novelist’s. Just the past three years have produced a line of beauty that stretches from Marilynne Robinson’s “ Home” to Roxana Robinson’s “ Cost” to Lily King’s “ Father of the Rain.” These are some of the finest recent American novels on any subject, but all of them portray the horror of watching a loved one drink or snort or inject himself to death.Įach of these writers managed to say something fresh about drug addiction, which tends, in its cruel way, to reduce a great variety of people to the same predictable plot: denying the problem, promising to quit, hitting rock bottom, falling into relapse and finally climbing up (or falling down) those 12 steps. The classics already there should inspire shakes and palpitations, enough anxiety of influence to make all but the most desperate writer drop the idea cold turkey. A new novel about drug addiction swaggers into a tough room.
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