American author Eric Puchner’s latest novel is a colossus: a vast, bright behemoth of a book, panoramic as the Montana skyline. Dream State opens in 2004 with the image of a young woman, a month before her wedding, diving into a perfect lake whose “blue expanse of water” reflects the “overlapping peaks of the Salish range”. From this Edenic outset, it traverses decades, barrelling through our present day into a projected future: dipping in and out of the lives of a tight cast of characters as they succeed and fail; love and fall out of love; change and stay the same.
The young woman is Cece. She has stepped out of the lakeshore family home of Charlie Margolis, a cardiac anaesthesiologist to whom she’s engaged. Route 30 traffic noise aside, the place is a bucolic idyll, marked by abundance and continuity: orchards filled with “ancient apple trees”, “raspberry bushes, magically replenishing”, mountain slopes “bristling with pines”. Cece “loves it more than any place on the earth”.
