Eric Puchner returns with an ambitious and deeply moving multigenerational novel that follows three lifelong friends and the betrayal at the center of their entwined fates.
Cece is in love. She has arrived early at her in-laws' beautiful lake house in Salish, Montana, to finish planning her wedding to Charlie, a medical student with a brilliant future. Charlie asks Garrett, his best friend from college, to officiate, though Cece can't imagine anyone less appropriate for the task; Garrett doesn't believe in love, much less marriage. But as she spends time with Garrett, and his gruff mask slips, her long-held expectations for her life with Charlie begin to crumble, her feelings for Garrett, a haunted by a tragic event from his past, become impossible to bury; she soon anticipates the big day with dread. And when she finally decides to follow her instincts, ditching her groom for his best man, their lives will be altered forever, the events of that July reverberating through marriage, parenthood, and, in the end, across generations.
Years later, Cece's daughter, Lana, and Charlie's son, Jasper, meet and become fast friends, reunited again and again throughout their adolescence. Before long, they find themselves enacting the very same mistakes that dogged their parents, falling victim to the perennial pitfalls of adulthood. How do we avoid duplicity, heartbreak, and deceit when mortality looms over us all?
With delicacy, precision, and enormous heart, “Dream State” casts the timeless travails of family in a singular light. Puchner has written a richly layered, character driven novel that is at once a study of the unholy catastrophe of marriage, and a tender ode to the beauty of impermanence.
