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”.
She’s come to Montana early to put the finishing touches to the wedding plans before the guests, or even Charlie, arrive. In his absence, Charlie has deputed his best friend, Garrett, to lend a hand. Garrett appears on the lakeshore as Cece is swimming – and from there, events unfold more or less as we’d expect. Cece and Garrett move rapidly through antagonism into fascination; the wedding looms; and decisions taken in the heat of the moment profoundly shape the lives of all three characters from that point on.
Puchner carries off his novel’s first act with aplomb, deploying the elements of the love triangle as the formula demands, but deftly, and with humour: light relief comes in the shape of a recalcitrant mountain goat, and a norovirus outbreak that topples the wedding party like dominoes. But it’s in the second act – and all the acts thereafter – that Puchner really flexes his muscles. His interest, it turns out, is not in the resolution of his love triangle, but in the idea that any such resolution is a chimera. Cece, Charlie and Garrett become parents, move through careers that wax and wane, grow old. Far from being finalised in the first act, their feelings about and for one another continue to shift and complicate as the decades unfold.
This absence of resolution is most visible in the lives of the trio’s children, via whom Puchner presents us with a dichotomy: they’re at once actors in their own right, and vessels carrying forward a queasy inheritance. The relationship between two of them, Jasper and Lana, is the subject of a perfectly formed chapter at the heart of the book, in which Puchner makes it clear that their own feelings are at once deeply personal, and at the same time inflected by their odd, slanting glimpses into the relationship between their parents. By following his characters over the course of years, Puchner shows us that we’re not fixed at the point of early adulthood; that change remains not just possible but inevitable. Yet in revealing how profoundly the children’s lives are shaped by the actions of their parents, he simultaneously calls the whole idea of free will into question.
And free will means something different for those born in the 21st century. In its scope and plenitude, Dream State feels, at times, like a Victorian novel: an unhurried depiction of a rich, full world, in which actions have consequences that ripple across generations. But where the great novelists of the Victorian age tended to set their players’ foibles and insecurities against stable, knowable landscapes, these characters’ journeys take place amid a landscape that is slipping and changing, year by year, degree by terrifying degree. Puchner measures the passage of time by the disappearance of wildlife, the recession of the snowline and, most poignantly, by the retreat of the lake from the shore, leaving behind a “dry lake bottom … bleached grey as the moon”. Lana and Jasper’s summers are hotter and less bounteous than their parents’, and their choices, as a result, are curtailed. As the years pass, the book itself evolves, from romantic drama into elegy: for the characters’ lost youth, but more profoundly for the loss of a version of youth that is carefree and filled with potential.
In his wrenching final chapter, Puchner takes us back to the beginning, and shows us the events that set his central characters’ feet on the path to their endings. We feel, in an instant, both the loss of the promise their own lives contained and the collective loss of a steadily unfolding future that once we took for granted. In Dream State, Puchner seduces us with a familiar and deeply secure narrative structure, only to undermine that structure, to force it to tell a tale of profound and fatal insecurity. But he tells his tale so compellingly, so engagingly, with such warmth and humour, that it’s not until you set the book down that you can appreciate the breadth and brilliance of what he’s done.
Dream State by Eric Puchner is published by Sceptre, £18.99.To support the Guardian, order your copy atguardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.