Even if you live in Montana, the place is partly a dream — a fantasy shaped by our cultural imagination and the vestiges of frontier mythology. But our vision of its future, and that of the rest of America, is now filtered through the dystopian lens of climate fear and grief. Eric Puchner wrestles with these competing images in “Dream State,” a multigenerational saga set in a fictionalized version of Montana’s Flathead Valley.
A lake at the valley’s center is the story’s shimmering nucleus, where the main characters, Cece, Charlie and Garrett, are brought together by an ill-fated wedding. The water — often blanketed by a haze of wildfire smoke — recedes over the course of the characters’ lifetimes as they struggle through their own periods of haze and decline: depression, addiction and finally Alzheimer’s.
The story opens with Cece, the book’s strongest character, a determined, compulsive young bride-to-be preparing for her lakeside wedding to the happy, successful cardiac anesthesiologist Charlie. Her fiancé can’t get away from work in Los Angeles, so he asks his best friend, Garrett, a Montana native, to help her. Garrett is lost in guilt over the accidental death of a friend, and suffers from dreamlike depressive episodes. His brooding, blunt-force honesty represents everything that Charlie is not, and Cece begins to fall for him. After a norovirus outbreak leaves the wedding in shambles, a change of heart derails everyone’s plans and the emotional ramifications dictate the rest of the book.
Charlie’s subsequent descent into confusion and grief is as precipitous as Garrett’s rise into marriage and fatherhood. “Dream State” follows the characters from their 20s into their 70s, from the recent past to the near future. In a sense, it’s a coming-of-old-age story, beginning after the traditional bildungsroman would end and running to the final chapter of life. Such novels remind us that a mutable self doesn’t end with adolescence, while reflecting our latent, almost Victorian fear of a life not-well-lived — one increasingly dominated by dread over climate change.
This climate dread takes over the final act, and Puchner’s imagined future is the least successful aspect of the book. It falls into the predictable pattern of “everything bad has gotten worse” with little variation or revelation. A familiar predator disappears. Glaciers melt. Ski resorts close. People are tired and helpless. The only meaningful technological innovation is a foldable phone called an Origami. Somehow, wildfires rage endlessly, forcing characters to spend many of the later pages in respirator masks.
The characters’ children, Lana, Jasper and Téa are gussied up with plenty of Gen Z stereotypes (quirky, poly, jaded) but see the world with the same myopic fear as their parents’, and by the time Jasper ends up in a nihilist death cult in the California desert, they feel more like propaganda in a set piece about what a mess we’ve made of the world than fully embodied representatives of their time.
“Dream State” is at its best when Puchner allows his characters to be unpredictable even to themselves. Cece’s sudden emotional shift upends a love life that once seemed ideal; Garrett maintains a complex and enduring affection for his absentee father; his friendship with Charlie contains jealousy, rage and love in equal parts. In the book’s most powerful moment, Charlie asks Lana, “Do you hate me too?” and the universal “too,” encompassing a lifetime of shame, hits like a fist. Such moments of precision shine, and I found myself wishing they had been set free of the dream smothering the landscape.
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