Dream State explores love, friendship, marriage, grief, and regret over a 50 year period where “Life was a long, incompetent search to get back to a feeling you had when you were six.”

Set in Montana, Eric Puchner’s novel Dream State opens with bride-to-be Cece making final preparations for her wedding at the family lake house of her fiancé, Charlie. She’s surprised and not entirely pleased when Charlie’s brooding best friend Garrett shows up to help, per Charlie’s request. A contagious stomach bug and one unexpected love triangle later, Cece makes an impulsive decision that irrevocably alters the course of all their lives, with consequences that ripple across the next five decades.  

I love reading multigenerational family sagas and the 50 year span of this story did not disappoint. It really made me reflect on what it means to spend decades building a life with someone and making decisions about a future that is impossible to foresee. The book explores how the impact of our decisions endures for years, changing the course of our lives and leaving behind pieces for our children to pick up.

While the narrative gives fairly equal air time to Charlie, Cece, and Garrett, it really feels like Garrett’s story. He’s the most developed and understandable character of the three. I never quite grew to like Cece or understand her motivations, and Charlie almost seems like a mere vehicle (albeit a very important one) for the larger story. 

Dream State is a very powerful, moving book. The Montana setting is vivid and immersive, and Puchner fills the narrative with beautiful, funny, and sharp observations about friendship, marriage, family, grief, loyalty, and regret. The novel’s lengthy time frame enables Puchner to explore time as the antagonist and expose the impact of human decisions not just on our lives, but on our environment. 

I finished Dream State feeling a bit melancholy. It reminds us that the decisions we think are pivotal and the many mundane moments we quickly forget accumulate to form a life. With Puchner’s strong writing, the accumulation of these moments over decades and generations created a poignancy that really tugged at my heartstrings.

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