Marina Endicott started multi-generational tale ‘Close to Hugh’ 16 years ago

TORONTO – Some 16 years ago, acclaimed Edmonton author Marina Endicott was teaching a writing class and asked her students to pen a tale about intentions.

She also participated in the exercise, in which one character had to be doing something and not wanting to let the other character know.

“I wrote this little scene about a man following an older woman into a thrift store and trying to do her a little bit of good without letting her know,” said the author of 2008’s “Good to a Fault,” which was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and won a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

“I just put it away. I didn’t think about it for a long time but it just sat there in the back of my head, and I just knew those people really well, instantly.”

Over the years, other stories attached the original one and eventually formed her new novel, “Close to Hugh.”

The eponymous protagonist is a 50-something art gallery owner who falls off a ladder as he’s dealing with his dying mother and the crises of his friends during one fall week in Peterborough, Ont.

“Maybe what made it more urgent to write it was that my own kids were growing up and about to leave and I was thinking about being on the cusp of entering the world and being on the cusp of leaving the world, like Hugh’s mother is,” said Endicott.

“Maybe I couldn’t have really written it until I watched my kids growing up and growing out.”

Indeed, “Close to Hugh” is a multi-generational tale: As Hugh and his friends grapple with mid-life and end-of-life issues, a younger generation enters adulthood.

Characters include Ruth, a neighbour who helped raise Hugh and his childhood friends Della and Newell.

Della is a visual artist and Newell is an actor dating Hugh’s foe, Burton, who is directing a master class theatre project for teens.

The narrative shifts from Hugh’s perspective to stream of consciousness from other characters and includes various puns on the protagonist’s name.

Endicott said the puns came to mind as she “was thinking about duty and obligation and what we owe to other people.”

“The Hugh-you duality kept coming back to my mind and creeping into the writing. At first I was careful about it, because I know that some people have a problem with puns, they find them upsetting. I think they work way better on the page than if you say them out loud,” she said.

“But I came to realize that the pun was woven really deeply into what I was trying to do with the book — that I was trying to look at likeness, at how this is like this and these people are the same.

“At the same time, what’s built into a pun is they’re the same but there’s something interestingly and intriguingly different about them.”

A former actress and playwright, Endicott knew well the performing arts world she was writing about. (She even worked in a theatre in Peterborough for 18 months when she first started acting.)

But when it came to writing about the visual arts, she was “approaching it as an outsider” and looking at it concretely, she said.

“Close to Hugh” also touches on the pervasiveness of technology, with characters using various devices and social media.

Ultimately, the book is about relationships between generations and how they’re similar in certain ways.

“I’m really looking at how likenesses between people, sons and daughters and parents, but also between youth and age,” said Endicott, whose 2011 novel “The Little Shadows” was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award.

“That those things that are the same again are the things that allow us to have empathy for other people.”