Dream State

November 1, 2024

Short story author Puchner (Last Day on Earth) pens a novel that spans 50 years as it follows two generations. Cece plans to marry Charlie, but when she meets his best friend from college, she runs off with him instead, on the eve of her wedding. Years later, Charlie invites them back into his life, but it's difficult to let go of the past. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from January 1, 2025
Puchner's (Last Day on Earth, 2017) riveting second novel follows a trio of characters and the decades-long ripple effects of their choices on those closest to them. It's 2004, and Cece is engaged to her medical school sweetheart Charlie, their wedding to be held at Charlie's idyllic family home in Montana. Charlie enlists his best friend from college, Garrett, to check on Cece before the big day. Initially wary of one another, an adrift Garrett finds himself drawn to Cece, and soon thereafter Cece leaves Charlie. Years later, the three reconnect, and as time unfolds, their complicated friendship and affections shift alongside the ache of the unspoken. Charlie struggles with a string of failed marriages and a strained relationship with his son. Cece, a bookstore owner, finds herself questioning what she may have given up. Garrett, still wrestling with his own regrets, obsessively dives into his job tracking wolverines in a race against their extinction. The ghosts of the past equally haunt their respective children's formative years, spent vacationing together at the same Montana home, the dwelling and changing rural landscape a touchpoint throughout the novel. With interwoven perspectives, Puchner's layered saga is a deeply felt exploration of relationships and self-identity, and the imperfections hidden by the heart's pull.

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Starred review from February 15, 2025
A moving, psychologically acute, formally surprising family saga. Puchner's latest unfolds at first like a familiar (though stylish) literary romance. It's summer 2004. Cece, about to marry a promising young doctor named Charlie, has arrived early at her fiance's family lake house in Salish, Montana, where she makes final wedding preparations alongside their unlikely officiant, Garrett--a Middlebury friend of Charlie's who, after a tragic death for which he felt responsible, dropped out of college and returned home to Montana to heft baggage at the airport and tend to both his psychic wounds and his dying father. Garrett is an atheist who doesn't believe in marriage, an environmentalist who works for a polluter, a risk taker, and an incorrigible smartass; he and Cece clash immediately. The reader knows just where this is headed...but the inevitable romantic chaos (which takes place amid a norovirus outbreak that picks off the wedding party one by one) turns out to be not a destination but the starting point for an unusual and captivating family saga that will span 50 years, about half of them in a grim but realistic future of wildfire smoke and vanishing species. Cece and Garrett cross paths with Charlie (and his several wives) at first rarely and awkwardly, but later more regularly and affectionately. The next generation replicates and complicates the dynamic: Cece and Garrett's daughter, Lana, and Charlie's son, Jasper, are close friends, and after an adolescent entanglement that founders quickly and ends poorly, Lana--like her father--feels deeply guilty about what she's done to Jasper, whose life takes a dark turn. Sprawling and elegant--a novel that feels both old-fashioned and bracingly inventive.

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