Dream State (Doubleday, 2025), the lush, cinematic new work by novelist and Writing Seminars Associate Professor Eric Puchner, broaches hefty social ills—like climate change and drug addiction—as he follows a crew of college besties through adulthood. But the novel ultimately centers around an exploration of unconditional love, asking how much heartbreak and life's cruel twists a person can weather before "unconditional" hurts too much.
Puchner's tale centers on Cece, Charlie, and Garrett. Charlie and Garrett are best friends from college. Cece is Charlie's fiancée. Charlie is an ambitious young doctor, logging long hours at a Los Angeles hospital. As the story opens, Cece travels solo to Salish, Montana, the fictional oasis where Charlie's family has passed a summer cottage through the generations, to put finishing touches on their wedding. The house, across a perilous highway from an idyllic lake ringed by beach, has a makeshift, homey vibe that attracts relatives and guests like moths to a nightlight.
In Charlie's absence, he delegates Garrett to look after Cece. He does, then emcees the event, made disastrous by norovirus ripping through the guest list, ultimately felling the bride the morning after. Charlie goes home to work, leaving Cece to convalesce in Salish. Cece never follows him.
Instead, she and Garrett build a small-town life together. They have a daughter. They live minutes from Charlie's summer home but go nine years without seeing him before his pull toward Garrett and Cece supersedes his heartbreak. They, and then their children, weave in and out of one another's orbit in complicated ways. Such is life.
Puchner's prose especially shines in his skillful depiction of time passing. A stretch of chronological narrative is, without fanfare, followed by a leap into the future. Since the characters maintain, like the rest of us, a consistent inner self that defies aging, it's delightfully disorienting as a reader to pause and readjust to the narrative's present. It's an especially poignant strategy when Cece starts to slip into dementia, holding on to shreds of her former self as her mind vanishes. It's another heartbreak, but the deep connections remain worth the inevitable sacrifice.
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