Close to Hugh

Close to Hugh takes an exuberantly existential look at youth and age, art and life, love and death over one week in the world of gallery-owner Hugh Argylle. On Monday, a fall from a ladder leaves Hugh with a fractured vision of the pain--dying parents, shaky marriages, failure of every kind--suffered by those close to him. His friends are one missed ladder-rung from going under emotionally, physically, and financially. Somebody's got to fix them all. And it probably has to be Hugh. Meanwhile, beneath the adult orbit, bright young lives are taking form: the sons and daughters of Hugh's friends are about to graduate from high school and already floating away from the gravitational pull of their parents. As complicated bonds form and break in texts and ticks on multiplying media, the desires, terrors, and revelations of adolescence are mirrored in the second adolescence of the adults. With insight and mastery, Endicott creates...