Giller-nominated writer Marina Endicott’s newest book combines artistic personalities and codependent relationships to dramatic effect....It’s a sprawling group, and plots are occasionally lost and secondary characters can feel like ciphers. When Endicott homes in, however, she draws a powerful connection between the adults and their teenage kids (and their friends), all weighted by the past and reluctant to move forward. The younger ones are paralyzed by the fear of testing their talent in the bigger world; the elders, by the sobering realization that there might not be many more reinventions left in their lifetimes.

A nominee for both the Scotiabank Giller and the Governor General’s literary prizes for previous books, Endicott likes to dig into big themes, such as the importance of art and the meaning of goodness. Close to Hugh turns on the idea that the very forces that provide stability — your hometown, your family, your loyalty to friends — can also stifle you, and that those closest to you may be blind to who you really are. ...At its core, though, Close to Hugh is deeply sympathetic to the human condition. Early on in the novel, Hugh falls from a ladder, jarring his aging body — an insult even more than it is an injury. But Endicott’s promise is this: As long as we have life left in us, it’s always possible to get back up.

Reading a new novel by Marina Endicott, I am often reminded of the work of the late Carol Shields, the casually understated depth of her talent....With her new novel Close to Hugh, Endicott returns to the contemporary domestic drama that characterized Good To a Fault (which was shortlisted for the Giller Prize in 2008), following the vaudeville-age setting of The Little Shadows (itself longlisted for the Giller in 2011). It’s a powerful, rewarding novel, if occasionally problematic, circling around issues of love, loss, friendship, family and community....Readers might also have some difficulty with the sprawling nature of Close to Hugh, at least in the early stages of the book. The opening of the novel is somewhat forbidding, with the introduction of a daunting number of characters, whose relationships and interweavings only slowly emerge, and a barrage of stylistic approaches and points of view. It’s unclear whether it’s a matter of Endicott taking a bit of time to find her stride, or if it just takes the reader a while to adjust, but there comes a point, relatively early on, when the novel seems to open up, to allow the reader wholly into this world....Close to Hugh cuts far deeper, peeling back pretensions and facades in pursuit of those fundamental human truths so dear to Endicott, and to Shields before her.

Marina Endicott’s oddly original and charming new novel, Close to Hugh – following the success of Good to a Fault and The Little Shadows – inhabits a particular geography involving a series of staircases...She writes beautifully about teenagers: “Ivy loves girls at this age, girls going wild, going like roller derby girls, each one a firecracker, a graceful, mad bacchante flying toward you in a violent swirl of eyes and arms.” Her use of technology and social media expands the possibilities of narrative ....I haven’t mentioned plot, mostly because plot is not quite the point. Close to Hugh feels more like a play than a book in its compression of time and space, connections illuminated between characters to create a web in the gossamer sense, in that connections are sometimes barely visible until they shimmer. The novel isat its best when the reader feels at the end of a ribbon...At other times, the connections are more manufactured. A misunderstanding between Hugh and his friend about her errant husband is elided through artificially unfinished sentences.

Elsewhere, there is too much explanation, although “too-muchness” is to be expected in a novel nearly 500 pages long. It seems as though Endicott has faced a similar challenge as one of her characters – how do you fit the whole wide world into a single piece of art?...Rich with adjectives, the novel addresses huge and general questions about the meaning of life and the universe with remarkable specificity. “We are tiny, unknowable, unimaginably unimportant, far from everything, only close to each other,” one character observes, which on a macro level is the point of Close to Hugh but, as the novel demonstrates, is also totally wrong. Because of how art itself brings the world into startling, vivid focus, and suddenly every little thing has meaning after all.