Introduction

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.

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Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE: BARTLEBY


The plan was to use the bird in his act, but Jacob didn’t have the stomach for it. The way to make a bird disappear was to dump it into a little pouch, and the only way to get the bird into the pouch was to flip it over very fast, so fast that it—she—would lose consciousness for a few seconds. ... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

-At the end of the first chapter, Jacob and Caroline, as 20-year-olds newly in love, have a conversation about Jacob’s family in which Caroline points out sorrowfully that Jacob’s father is all alone in the world. Jacob, still angry with his father, still not speaking to him, responds, “And whose fault is that?” and Caroline challenges this idea. She asks: “Is that what matters? Whose fault things are?” Jacob says of course it does; Caroline tells him earnestly that she hopes he’s wrong. So: how does the question of who’s at fault play out over the course of the book? Does your own sense of who’s in the wrong temper your sympathy for a character who is struggling or unhappy?

-Caroline plays a crucial role in the reconciliation of Jacob and his father, Martin. Why is this so important to her? How—and why—do she and Martin become so close? How much of this do you think has to do with her own missing father, or her relationship with her mother? With how much she admires Martin’s work? With Martin’s relationship with her teacher and mentor, Jill? With that first meeting with Martin, before she had even met Jacob?

-This is a novel that shifts points of view among the five major characters. How does this affect your shifting sympathies and investments in the characters? Is there one you were “rooting for” the most? Were you surprised by your affection/disaffection for any of them over the course of the novel? Did you find yourself experiencing any drastic changes in how you felt?

-How did the novel’s structure affect your experience of reading it?

-Who was your favorite character among the five? Which one—if any—would you want to be friends with in real life? Which relationship among the characters was your favorite?

-One character who looms large in the novel but whom we get to know only in the opening scene, when Jacob is a teenager, and later through other characters’ thoughts and memories of her, is Gloria. Based on what you know, what do you make of her and the choices she’s made about her marriage and family?

-In addition to focusing on the novel’s marriages, the various parent-child relationships, and the many friendships (and a few romances!), the novel pays close attention to each of the characters’ relationships to their work. What are your thoughts on, for example, Jacob and his practice of magic? Caroline’s career path and her attempts to find meaningful activities to engage in alongside caring for her baby? Jeanie’s relationship to her job? (Etc.)

-Which of the five protagonists changes the most over the course of the novel? Which changes the least? What do you imagine will happen to them in the years after the novel ends?

-One of the threads in the novel has to do with abandonment. What are the ways you see this playing out?

-What role does Dolores/Delirious the cockatiel play in the novel? What do you make of the Delirious-and-the-window moment near the novel’s end?

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