At this point in literary
history the narrative of drug addiction has been told by so many sources that
you’d think the reader would have grown as numb to it as one eventually does by
a certain point taking drugs. We’ve
heard in non-fiction, we’ve heard it in fiction; we’ve heard in biographies, we’ve
read in autobiography; we’ve read in adult fiction; we read it in YA
fiction. You’d think at a certain point
we’d get tired of hearing the same story told a different way a thousand times
but perhaps the reader is as addicted to the format as the subjects of the
stories are addicted to narcotics. You’d think the literary world would have realized
their has to be an inflection point for this, if for no other reason then the
fact that addiction has existed in some form for thousands of years and no
matter what we do it’s not going anywhere. Perhaps the publishing industry keeps
pushing these stories as a way of an answer to a government that doesn’t have
any interest in coming up with a solution to the problem that doesn’t involve
prison. Or perhaps because publishers are making as much money off of these
stories as the dealers and pharmaceutical companies are by selling the drugs in
the first place.
I’ve read my share of these
narratives over the years – who hasn’t? And while these stories are often
compelling on the silver screen or the small one, I’ve become tired of reading
them over the years. Because they have nothing new to say. It’s the same story over and over again. The
subject takes their first pill or snort, they slowly but surely become
addicted, they become strangers to their family and friends, they drain their
back accounts to feed their habit; they hit rock bottom; they find salvation –
or they don’t and die. In that sense Roxy a young adult novel written by Neal and
Jarrod Shusterman essentially stick to this formula: the novel opens with paramedics standing over
the body of a teenager who has OD’s, there is a tag applied to their body bag
labeled I. Ramey and the story then flashes back two months and we find
ourselves looking at the lives of Isaac and Ivy Ramey, two teenage siblings.
The formula is pretty standard, we know one of them going to be dead at the end
of the novel: the only surprise left is which one.
Except that’s not entirely
how the novel opens. Because the first chapter is told from the perspective
of Naloxone, the paramedic drug that is used on overdose patients as a last
ditch effort to save them. Naloxone tells the story; he knows how this saga has
begun and is trying to fight a futile battle against those he refers to as ‘the
others’. “Who only care for you as long as they have you locked in your embrace…
They promise you deliverance and reward you…with this.” When the attempt to resuscitate
failed, Naloxone curses the ‘soulless clan who brought you to The Party. And that
if I had a voice, I would tell your story.”
The narrative in the story is
told from two very different sets of narrators. The first two are Isaac and Ivy.
Ivy is the perpetual screw-up, who at the beginning of the novel has been
fighting with her scum boyfriend Craig. Isaac shows up to rescue her and injures
himself in the process. Their parents have determined labels for them: Ivy is
the perpetual loser; Isaac is the ‘good’ son.
They spend half of the time yelling at Ivy – and as we see, the rest of
it yelling at each other. In a very real
sense a lot of what happens in this novel is indirectly their fault.
The second part of the story –
the part that in a way is revolutionary – is told from the perspective of Roxy
and Addison. I imagine the idea of the
allegory is something that most teenagers – and indeed, most adults in this era
– have all but forgotten. In a very real
sense Roxy is essentially a version of Pilgrims’ Progress told in
the way of addiction. In many ways, particularly the names of the characters
here, it isn’t subtle. In a much more important way, it doesn’t matter because
by choosing to tell the stories of addiction by anthropomorphizing the drugs it tells an angel that a thousand tell-all
biographies can’t.
As you’ve probably guessed
Roxy is Oxycontin. One of the hippest members of The Party. Roxy spends her
life bringing ‘plus ones’ to The Party’ which has the appearance of the hippest
club that all addicts want to come to but is actually where they go to die. The
rest of the members are not subtle either but when it comes to addiction sometimes
you need to hit your audience over the head. Al is the bouncer, who hands
everybody a champagne flute “it’s how we shake hands’, always slurring his
words. Crys is small and unassuming, but up close he’s larger than life. Charlie and Dusty are the Coke brothers.
Molly is always floating around. Hiro is the back office and rarely comes out.
Mary Jane doesn’t get invited that much since she went legitimate. Lucy is
always flying around, never quite there, talking about transcendence. There’s also Vic, who travels in similar
circles with Roxy but neither likes each other.
Addison is, as Roxy puts in
when we first meet them, came up with Roxy with similar ideas. “Born to help
others rather than help themselves. The problem is Addison never outgrew that
stifling idealism.” He works mainly with children and adolescents and mainly
works with his ‘older sister’ Rita. Addison is jealous of Roxy because as he
puts it “their upline gets to do whatever they want” Rita seems indifferent to
this but Addison is in part jealous because he knows how these things work. “They
gorge themselves on what we grow.” Rita says that it is not their concern, but
it is worth noting that the writers never let us forget the repercussions. At
one point in the novel Addison is watching a student of his play chess and then
sees a homeless man who was once a prodigy of his, demolish a teacher. It takes
a moment for him to remember his name.
Early in the novel Addison
makes a wager with Roxy that he, without any help from his ‘upline’ can bring someone
to the Party, something he has never done. Eventually the two make a wager: if
Addison can bring someone to the party, Roxy will leave it for one year.
By this point Isaac, who
injured his ankle during his struggle to help Ivy, has taken his first
Oxycontin. His grandmother, worried about his pain, gave him one. In a sense
Isaac’s story is the more familiar one, though it is slightly different. Isaac
wants a career in science but his grades aren’t good enough on their own. He is
a skilled soccer player, but the injury has hampered his ability to play. He
takes the Oxy to recover quickly.
Ivy’s story is more interesting.
She travels in a worse crowd than Isaac does, who has friends who care about
him. She’s in danger of flunking out of high school and she wants to help herself.
She starts taking Adderall in order to help her concentrate and improve her
grades. It works so well that she’s soon organizing very extensively and can
barely sleep. She begins drinking heavily to balance that effect.
Roxy’s approach is
essentially that of a seductress, trying to convince Isaac to do the wrong
thing if it makes him feel good. Addison tries a different approach, trying to
convince her to keep using her to improve herself. In a sense, he does the
right job: he convinces her to finally dump the boyfriend who has destroyed her
life and improved her grades. But his path is far harder to navigate than Roxy’s
because there are far too many more tempting drugs. Throughout the book he goes
to desperate lengths to make sure that the Coke brothers and Crys do not lure
her in. This is not out of idealism but to win his bet.
I found myself responding to Roxy
not merely because of its approach but because the Shustermans have a
wonderful way of playing with language and fonts that I did not realize – and indeed,
the reader may not until they’ve gotten several chapters in. The chapters are
all titled, but several of the letters within the title are written in bold type.
Sometimes its obvious, sometimes its subtle. Both the title and the highlighted
word have a critical message to the theme of the chapter.
There are also interludes in
which several of the secondary characters who we see mentioned in the world of
Roxy and Addison keep showing up. Mary Jane is paying a visit to a reverend who
is recovering from cancer (he is having visits with Kimo, as she puts it) and
even as he recovers his nature causes him to curse her. Charlie and Dusty are
having session with a rock star. Lucy is attending a party of Ivy’s friends.
Phineas, who all the other drugs dislike, is at a nurse home where Isaac’s
grandmother is residing. Vic ends up talking to Isaac at a critical point in
the book. It may not exactly be a spoiler that the final visitor is named Hyde,
and that if you read his entire chapter carefully there’s one last hidden message
for the reader.
All of these interludes serve
a purpose to the larger story, some plot related, some just as character
related. I found the narrative of Phineas the most fascinating because ‘his
cousins despise him’ and consider him a
vulture’. The irony is, unlike Oxy, he does not destroy but brings relief. He
is also aware of what he is, that he has been there long before most of them
and has no illusions for what he is. In a way, he is the most sympathetic of
the entire group.
There is also the awareness
of the danger that they live in. Throughout the early stages of the novel,
there is reference to what happens when a member of the party goes to far. “Remember
Lude’ keeps coming up over and over. It is likely that the younger audience may
never have heard of Quaalude. Roxy is told of him after a visit with Hiro who
is upset with how much times she’s spending with Isaac. Finally late in the
novel, she climbs a plant that leads off the ceiling and to the roof. Lucy comes
with her, in her own dazed way, and both of them are increasingly terrified.
What they discover is the circle of hell that so many pharmaceuticals fear. A
flash of lightning reveals dozens chained to roofs, and the metaphor is heavily
religious. Lucy finds herself playing Dante as she recognizes some old friends.
The metaphor should be enough to warn Roxy of her inevitable fate but in a
horrible way it spells doom.
The saga of the Ramey siblings
is conventional but no less interesting. Isaac’s addiction manages to escape the
interest of his friends and family because he’s the good kid. Paradoxically, Ivy’s
problems are ignored because the people she’s improved so much that she doesn’t
want to hang out with her friends any more.
In the last two days of the novel, everything
comes to a crisis. Isaac finds himself realizing the horror of his situation and
tries to escape – and then finds himself looking for drugs in the last place he
would have thought. Ivy’s fate is different when she is ironically blamed for
something she did not do and goes on her own spiral, where she avoids the
obvious pitfalls but comes back to find everything that is wrong with Isaac.
That the two of them could have saved each other had they been the people they
were before the novel began is just one of those ironies of addiction.
I won’t reveal which Ramey
sibling ends up going to the Party and not leaving, even though you may think
you know the answer in advance. The more interesting parallels are the stories
of Addison and Roxy. Addison’s path is
one more borne of desperation, chafing at his nature and essentially wanting to
be one of the cool kids that so many of us do. Roxy’s is more interesting and
sadder.
In both cases, Addison and
Roxy have conversations with Ivy and Isaac respectively. This is actually logical, as how many times
we’ve heard variations on the theme that the voice of the drug is louder than
anything else. What Roxy does is argue that this is not a one-way street.
That the drugs themselves interact, may even be capable of feeling something
for their charges. In a real sense, Ivy and Isaac have as much a hold over
Addison and Roxy as they do on them.
The ending is devastating,
not only because we see the death of a teenager who had a bright future but was
lost to addiction. In the final pages we see something infinitely sadder. For one horrible moment, Roxy comes to realize
her true nature and we see that in her own way, she’s trapped in a cycle as
vicious as the addiction that drives so many others. She realizes her inevitable fate and it’s
horrible but not as horrible as how we see her the final pages. Roxy is
an incredible read for all of the reasons I’ve already discussed but there’s
something more astonishing that I felt when it was over. For the briefest of
moments, I felt sympathy for the personification of one of the leading causes
of the opioid crisis. Perhaps some
people will take a different way to view it as a happy ending when they
consider Roxy’s inevitable fate. For the millions whose lives have been
destroyed just like the Rameys have been, it can’t come soon enough.
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