How can I remember enough about a novel to answer a close-book exam question?

This is a really important question! A lot of people struggle with the immensity of the task of remembering enough detailed information about a novel to answer an essay question in an exam. Even though ultimately we all have to try out different strategies to see what works for us individually (all brains are different), here is a bit of generally applicable advice: Think of the task of remembering as a process of gradually building a structure. Start by going over the framework within which the literary content of the novel exists. ie. the plot. A good exercise is to write more and more detailed plot summaries until you are confident in your knowledge of what happens. You could write a paragraph about what happens in the whole novel, and then once you are sure of that you could try to write a paragraph or bullet points about each chapter, and so on. Once you are confident in your knowledge of the plot, start thinking about ways that you can remember and understand the literary detail. Can you think of important themes which come up in the novel? Did you talk about key themes in class? At which points in the plot did the themes crop up? You can try colour coding your themes and annotating your copy of the novel to help you to remember them and their positions in the book.Once you have developed a knowledge of the novel and its themes, you can more build up your body of textual evidence, or quotes. Keep the quotes short and limit the number of them that you choose per theme. Highlight them in the theme colour in your copy of the book, write them out repeatedly, or use an online resource to help you to commit them to memory. I really like quizlet.com, which is a site where you can make your own flashcards.
I hope this helped! The general thing to remember is that you need to make your own systems for organising and simplifying the information in a book, so that it doesn’t feel overwhelming once you come to the exam. Good luck!