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.