Dream State by Eric Puchner: book review

Dream State by Eric Puchner (Out February 18)

Thank you to Doubleday for sending me an ARC of this book so I can bring you this early review! Opinions all my own.

Overview: Cece finds herself as the point of a love triangle on her wedding day. Having gone to Montana a month early, without her fiancé, to plan the wedding, she finds herself falling into an enemies to lover's romance with her fiancé's best friend. The book starts right before the wedding in 2004 and charts Garrett, Charlie, and CeCe's lives and unlikely friendship through to their deaths—from finding careers to raising kids to growing old and watching the planet deteriorate around them, this is the most holistic look at a set of characters I've seen. Overall: 4

Characters: 4 The dynamics here are interesting, but there's a certain lack of depth to these characters where they struggle to move beyond being archetypes with little quirks. Their relationships, overall, are what drive the book, but they could have been mined further. Garrett is the most interesting character. He starts the book still on shaky footing from a rough mental health bout that left him hospitalized in San Fransisco. Over the course of the book, he manages to find his calling, pursuing his passion for the outdoors and realizing that he loved parts of life he couldn't imagine actually enjoying. Cece is from LA and approaches life in Montana like a quintessential city person. She loves to romanticize the quaint town and abundant nature until she throws a big fit about the place's "lack of culture" among other things. Cece is a tough character to sympathize with because she's often her own agent of chaos and the driver of her own unhappiness where her in the moment impulses tend to conflict with her more shallow wants. Then there's Charlie, accomplished in his field as a doctor and trying incredibly hard to embody the optimism he knows he should feel. Part of the interest in Charlie's character development is watching the mask slip, revealing that this disposition was somewhat of an act all along. 

The minor characters vary in their development. The group of college friends is interesting to track through the years, and they have a surprising amount of development. Charlie, Garrett, and Cece's kids become entwined in each other's lives and the oldest kids become a central focus of the book, but they struggle with the same developmental problems as the main characters. Also, all of the children are given the same voice in their youth, and, to me, even as someone who grew up in the vein of the precocious kids that Puchner is clearly trying to convey here, didn't feel realistically like eight or eleven or sixteen year olds. The fact that their voices and personalities hardly changed through these major age jumps further drove this point home. Being just slightly older than these characters (based on the timeline of when the wedding was), they also used references and words that didn't feel at all fitting of my generation. It felt like all of the characters were very much being drawn from the same well regardless of age or gender or background. 

I will say, even though Lana, Garrett and Cece's daughter, seems a bit contrived, I really did come to love her character. Maybe it's because I saw myself most in her, but I did find myself enjoying the book more when she was in the scene. I also felt like she had by far the best character development over the arc of the book as we saw her go from a somewhat bratty kid to an ambitious young adult to a middle aged person with the capacity to view the world beyond herself. Puchner managed to show a softening in her character that didn't compromise her essential personality, which I want to give fair props for. 

Plot: 3 This book could've comfortably been half its length and perhaps made its point in a clearer fashion. I love the idea of taking the reader through not just the big dramatic runaway bride moment but watching the repercussions of that play out over years and years. Rarely do we follow characters through the full arcs of their lives. We get to see the moments of satisfaction and regret that come from it as well as an unlikely healing of a friendship. I think the biggest problem with the book is that Puchner wants to follow everyone, everywhere all at once. There are too many threads; we're intimately following too many people as the scope expands to include adult children. The chapters stray in too many directions without connection to a central thread. In going so wide, the substance feels diluted. Also, the chapters are long and often overwrought with detail, which majorly impacts the pacing. It felt like, especially towards the end of the book, Puchner developed a fear of boring the audience and threw everything but the kitchen sink at adding to the plot from a rescue at a cult to one of the characters becoming a movie star to long passages trying to illustrate Alzheimers on the page. I honestly wish that less time had been devoted to forward motion and more time given to backfilling the characters' relationship before the wedding. Those few chapters were the most compelling. 

Writing: 4 You're probably wondering by now why I gave the book a 4 when I've done a fair amount of complaining. A lot of it is the setting. I grew up in Wyoming, in a resort town a bit further along than the one in Montana described here but a gateway to a National Park nonetheless. I don't know if I've ever seen that kind of setting or the intimate knowledge of nature you gain from growing up in a place like that reflected in a novel. While there was too much detail overall in my opinion, the bits about hiking, skiing, backcountry work, and even wolverines hit close to home and felt like a warm hug. I also went to college in LA, the other setting of the novel, so this felt like a fun fusion of worlds. And Puchner generally does well with writing setting. 

I didn't love the prose style overall. There were some sentence level crutches throughout that just personally bugged me, and while the book is sprawling, it largely felt surface level, which was frustrating. Books that I love burrow in deep, and I never found that here. I think this is largely a matter of preference, and there's a lot of good to find in this book. Also, the book projects into the near future to cover the entire scope of the lives of people who would, at present, be approximately in parents' age group—somewhere in their late forties or early fifties. Puchner uses much of this future-casting to focus on climate change and the impending climate disasters that are getting more real by the day. This is natural considering his choice of settings, but it all just hit too close to home. He describes a perpetually burning LA, landmarks destroyed, which stoked my anxiety given that LA is dealing with unprecedented and unconfined wild fires as I write this. Also, smaller details like summer in Montana becoming nearly unlivable from constant wildfire smoke both local and blown in set off my anxiety. The truly erratic temperatures. Skiing being nearly gone. As someone who cares deeply about climate change and watches in horror as the effects start to visibly take hold every day, this book just stoked my anxiety and made me feel even more hopeless about my future, everyone else's, and that of a place I truly love. As someone who did not need a wake-up call, the end of the book just made me sick to my stomach because Puchner is right, all of this will happen given the current trajectory of our leadership. That makes me incredibly sad, and that's not his fault for being a realist, for writing a novel that casts out to that place. If this could make someone understand the future we're heading towards, effect even small change in someone, then that's amazing. But I say this as a warning if you're in a delicate place regarding the state of the world right now. Be gentle with yourself.

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