From the very first pages of Dream State, Eric Puchner draws readers right into the seemingly charmed world of a multigenerational summer lake house in the imaginary town of Salish, Montana—a house graced with outdated carpet, board games, bric-a-brac on every windowsill, Adirondack chairs, apple orchards, raspberry bushes and cherry trees. “Fingers stained red,” Puchner writes, “bloated with fruit, you’d run across Route 35 and jump into the lake to clean off, whooping lustily at the cold, feeling like a character in a Russian novel.” The year is 2004, and the cottage belongs to the Margolis family, who are ready to celebrate the wedding of anesthesiologist Charlie Margolis and his fiancée, Cece, a medical school dropout who “was sure she had something great to offer the world, something big and pure-hearted and indispensable. If only she could figure out what it was.”
Into this scene walks Charlie’s best friend, Garrett, an airport baggage handler who is hiding from life, tending to his dying father and struggling with the fallout from the accidental death of their mutual college friend, for which he feels responsible. This is a packed saga of the very best kind, spanning from the characters’ college days through their old age, examining a multitude of themes that include friendship, betrayal, marriage, parenting, aging—and also the road not taken, climate change and addiction. Not many authors could successfully pull off such a sprawling, multifaceted chronicle, but Puchner excels at both the big picture and the small details, creating funny, believable dialogue throughout and using characters’ expertise to enrich the plot (such as Charlie’s medical knowledge or Garrett’s later career as an environmental scientist specializing in wolverine protection).
“If you look for a meaning, Tarkovsky once said, you’ll miss everything that happens,” a character says near the end of the novel, citing the Soviet filmmaker. Happily, however, this novel overflows with both meaning and intriguing plot, layer by layer, year by year, and even doubles back on itself in an artful way, returning to the Margolis wedding at the very end.
Although very different books, Dream State shares remarkable similarities with Louise Erdrich’s The Mighty Red: They both skillfully and humorously center on a wedding and a young love triangle, a tragic accidental death, and concerns about climate change and the ways humans damage the environment. Don’t miss Dream State, whose memorable characters leave readers with plenty to contemplate about life’s most vital aspects.
