Dream State: A Novel

by Eric Puchner

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Spanning fifty years, three best friends grapple with life, love, family and climate change set against the Montana terrain in Dream State. This is perfect for fans of Ann Napolitano and The Paper Palace.

“Dream State is a delight…An exquisitely rendered novel about the vagaries of fate, and friendship, and love.” —Alice McDermott, National Book Award winner and author of Absolution

Cece is in love. She has arrived early at her future in-laws’ lake house in Salish, Montana, to finish planning her wedding to Charlie, a young doctor with a brilliant life ahead of him. Charlie has asked Garrett, his best friend from college, to officiate the ceremony, though Cece can’t imagine anyone more ill-suited for the task—an airport baggage handler haunted by a tragedy from his and Charlie’s shared past. But as Cece spends time with Garrett, his gruff mask slips, and she grows increasingly uncertain about her future. And why does Garrett, after meeting Cece, begin to feel, well, human again? As a contagious stomach flu threatens to scuttle the wedding, and Charlie and Garrett’s friendship is put to the ultimate test, Cece must decide between the life she’s dreamed of and a life she’s never imagined.

The events of that summer have long-lasting repercussions, not only on the three friends caught in its shadow but also on their children, who struggle to escape their parents’ story. Spanning fifty years and set against the backdrop of a rapidly warming Montana, Dream State explores what it means to live with the mistakes of the past—both our own and the ones we’ve inherited.

Written with humor, precision, and enormous heart, both a love letter and an elegy to the American West, Dream State is a thrillingly ambitious ode to the power of friendship, the weird weather of marriage, and the beauty of impermanence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780385550666
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/18/2025
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	30,577
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

ERIC PUCHNER is the author of the story collection Music Through the Floor, a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award; the novel Model Home, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award in Fiction; and a second short story collection, Last Day on Earth. His short stories and personal essays have appeared in GQ, Granta, Tin House, Best American Short Stories, and more. He has received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is an associate professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore with his wife, the novelist Katharine Noel, and their two children.

Editorial Reviews

02/03/2025

In this introspective drama from Puchner (Model Home), two families’ entwined fates are set in stark relief against harsh changes to the climate in near-future Montana. It begins in summer 2004, when medical school dropout Cece Calhoun travels by herself from Los Angeles to Salish, Mont., to begin preparations for her wedding to anesthesiologist Charlie Margolis, which will be held at his family’s summer home. Charlie, concerned she’ll feel isolated, sends his best friend and their officiant, Garrett Meek, to check on her. Cece and Garrett form a strong and unexpected connection, and they end up running away together shortly after the wedding. Nine years later, Charlie, now married with two children and still summering in Montana, invites Cece, Garrett, and their daughter, Lana, back into his life. Puchner’s immersive narrative often has the feel of flipbook animation as it glides across the ensuing decades, highlighting Cece’s struggles with running a bookstore, Garrett’s fixation on tracking wolverines, and Lana’s connection with Charlie’s troubled son, Jasper, who later struggles with heroin addiction and is drawn to a dangerous cult. In the meantime, the nearby lake dries up and wildfire smoke becomes ever present, a subtle rebuke to choices made by the characters decades earlier. Puchner’s expansive yet nuanced storytelling has much to offer. Agent: Dorian Karchmar, WME. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

A March 2025 Indie Next Pick • One of Lit Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2025

“Dream State is a delight…An exquisitely rendered novel about the vagaries of fate, and friendship, and love.” —Alice McDermott, National Book Award winner and author of Absolution

“A moving, psychologically acute, formally surprising family saga…Sprawling and elegant…both old-fashioned and bracingly inventive.” —Kirkus Reviews *starred review*

“Puchner’s exuberant, gritty, glittering new novel…is fresh, wise, funny, and compassionate….Cinematic from the outset, Dream State opens (just as if a circular lens were unscrewing) upon a beloved old family homestead, site of a doomed wedding—descriptions so warm and attentive, a reader can’t help falling in head first…What strikes most powerfully is Puchner’s bold inhabiting of each stage, over two generations, of all these sensibilities— especially of true, if embattled, affection between men….Dream State is a wonderful feast, and feat.” —Boston Globe

“A masterpiece. Dream State is a glittering, evocative achievement.” —Adam Johnson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Orphan Master’s Son

“Filled to the brim with life, Dream State is a wonder of character and craft.” —Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less and Less is Lost

“Lush, immersive, devastating, and stunningly alive, Dream State did the thing the very best novels do: pulled me relentlessly into its characters, its setting, concerns, losses, and triumphs, only to let me loose again with a sharper, clearer vision of the world outside.” —Lynn Steger Strong, author of The Float Test

“[Puchner’s] novel overflows with both meaning and intriguing plot, layer by layer, year by year….Don’t miss Dream State, whose memorable characters leave readers with plenty to contemplate about life’s most vital aspects.” –BookPage *starred review*

“Masterfully built.” –Financial Times

“Funny and wild; some of the most beautiful writing that I have ever read.” —Matthew Klam, author of Who Is Rich?

“Eric Puchner has populated his engrossing and deeply affecting novel with characters so complicated and sympathetic that we want—we need—to know how their lives will turn out, and what will happen to the glorious and fragile landscape they inhabit.” —Francine Prose, author of Mister Monkey

“Eric Puchner’s Dream State delivers everything I want in a novel: a love triangle, a moving friendship story, a delicious setting (including some of the best skiing scenes I’ve ever read in my life) and rumination about how we search for meaning in our lives…an absolute masterpiece.” —Elin Hilderbrand, author of The Perfect Couple and Swan Song

“Dream State is a gorgeous exploration of time, grief, love, and the way that the commitments we make turn us into the people we become…brilliant.” —Danielle Evans, author of The Office of Historical Corrections

“Dream State explores several monumental themes—love, family, identity, human transience, climate change—but always with a scrupulous attention to the fate of individuals, and always with a powerful sense of intimate connection. . .a remarkable achievement.” —Andrew Motion, UK Poet Laureate 1999-2009

From the Publisher