Close-Up: A Novel

by Michelle Herman

Overview

A story about the ties that bind us, Close-Up explores what makes, drives, complicates, and undermines our most important relationships.

In this artful, expansive novel, we follow five protagonists—Jacob, Martin, Caroline, Jeanie, and Jill—through love, marriage, parenthood, and the romance of friendship as they struggle to make sense of themselves and each other and of what makes for good art, good magic, and a good life. What follows is a story only Michelle Herman could write: one of missed connections and old grievances, of loneliness and longing, of rifts and reconciliations and redemption. Close-Up depicts the fraught entanglements of the relationships we’re born into and those we choose—carefully or with abandon—with the precision and nuance that has characterized her work over the last thirty years.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780578905280
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	03/15/2022
Pages:	376
Sales rank:	908,816
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

MICHELLE HERMAN is the author of the novels Missing, Dog, and Devotion and the collection of novellas A New and Glorious Life, as well as three essay collections—The Middle of Everything, Stories We Tell Ourselves, and Like A Song—and a book for children, A Girl's Guide to Life. She writes a popular parenting column for Slate and has taught creative writing for many years at Ohio State. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.

MICHELLE HERMAN is the author of the novels Missing, Dog, and Devotion and the collection of novellas A New and Glorious Life, as well as three essay collections—The Middle of Everything, Stories We Tell Ourselves, and Like A Song—and a book for children, A Girl's Guide to Life. She writes a popular parenting column for Slate and has taught creative writing for many years at Ohio State. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Editorial Reviews

In her captivating new novel, Close-Up, Michelle Herman unfolds a complex family history in which abandonment has caused painful estrangements and unexpected alliances. With subtle wit and unshakeable confidence, Herman demonstrates the alternating forms a family can take: a refuge, a prison, a solace, a vexation, one at a time or all at once, and right before your eyes. Close-Up is a magic act of a novel and not just because its main character is a magician.

author of Property and I Give It to You - Valerie Martin

Michelle Herman’s novel is one of those books that I read in the full belief that its characters are real. No way could Caroline and Jacob not exist; their buoyant conversation, their predicaments, their struggles to grow up whole (and sane) in the company of their infuriating parents were too alive on the page to be merely—merely?!—constructed by this canny and sophisticated, tough and tender author. Her novel, both wise and smart, is wholly deserving of its place as the first winner of the Donald L. Jordan Literary Prize for Excellence.

author of The Lake on Fire - Rosellen Brown

★ 2022-02-25
Good things can happen to lonely hearts and wounded families. Here's how.

Herman's latest novel assembles an accomplished cast of characters: a successful stage magician, a major American novelist, a published poet, a talented student poet and her world-wise single mother, a cockatiel, and, eventually, a precocious baby. As gifted as they may be, at the outset, things aren't going particularly well for most of them. The famous novelist, Martin Lieberman, is hit the hardest. Shortly before Thanksgiving he is abruptly abandoned by his wife; hearing this news, his teenage magician son, Jacob, decides not to come home from college. This means Jacob's cockatiel, Dolores, who was being cared for by his mother, is abandoned as well, and in fact Martin has no more idea than the bird of why all this has happened to him. The published poet, Jill Rosen—the protagonist of Herman's Dog (2005)—is less drastically miserable, but her life is not turning out quite as she might have hoped: She's aging, still single, and less successful than some of her friends. She does enjoy teaching, particularly when the student is as gifted (and worshipful) as Caroline Forester. The Kokosing State campus, where Jill teaches, where Jacob and Caroline are students, where Martin is a guest lecturer, turns out to be a fortuitous locale, as the characters cross paths there and begin to become part of each other's lives. Herman, who's noted for her writing about relationships, takes the time to bring every corner of this fictional world to life, including excerpts of all the writers' writings (they're good!), the evolution of Jacob's magic act, details about Martin's post-divorce linen closet, and the ongoing (and unexpectedly central) role of the pet bird. Almost all the characters change in interesting ways, but the depiction of Martin's transformation, as unlikely as it may be for a great man like him, is particularly generous and moving.

Fans of both Ann Patchett and Anne Tyler are likely to enjoy this satisfying, unhurried novel.

Kirkus Reviews