Across literary circles, Oprah Winfrey’s most recent book club selection Dream State by Hopkins Professor Eric Puchner is abducting fans from the real world, making them miss their subway stops. For me, returning to my dorm from Hodson Hall past midnight, I missed the man in a sandy suit with blonde hair and round glasses waving me down for a lighter. This was perhaps an odd occurrence for the backside of Gilman past midnight, but these things don’t matter when Dream State is on the mind.
That night, I finished Dream State and returned to my dorm. My mind was a prelingual pileup of emotions and phantom pains, the ones left loitering when a book is finished and you realize that’s all you’ll hear from the characters, like leaving your high school on the last day of senior year. You feel these things after good books — or at least I do — but especially after Dream State.
While I don’t have as much space as the book, nor Puchner’s propensity for prose, I’ll attempt to convey the plot. The setting is cardiac anesthesiologist Charlie’s lakehouse in Montana, and the occasion is his wedding to medical school dropout Cece, who is alone at the lakehouse arranging the wedding. The conflict: misanthropic airport baggage handler Garrett — Charlie’s best friend from college tasked with officiating the wedding — entertaining Cece before Charlie arrives and — though no one asked him to — falling in love with her. As he fails to prepare his speech and fumbles to interact humanly with Cece, he finds the time to drunkenly email her a profession of his love. Meanwhile, the fate of the wedding itself is in flux as the party is ravaged by norovirus.
Like leftovers from a good dinner, the anticipated wedding scene is wrapped up and saved for later. Suddenly, the cast leaps to the future as Cece and Garrett are married with one oddball daughter Lana, and Charlie marries a Greek lookalike of Cece and has two kids, Jasper and Téa. Charlie, inspired by a friendship fallout in the life of one of his patients, reconnects with Garrett and Cece to invite them to the lakehouse for a reunion. The night goes over like a boy fallen off his bike: bruised but smiling, trying to pretend nothing hurts. The car ride home, Garrett comments to Cece that Charlie was performing all night.
This is how the summers that Lana remembers spending at the lakehouse in Montana start, her and Jasper’s parents making up for lost time while she and Jasper begin new times. Many years plus a near-death cardiac event and pacemaker for Jasper later, and the two’s relationship has taken on the romantic connotations of summertime flings. Still, the two continue to grow up and apart: Lana veering toward Hollywood acting and directing, Jasper toward drug addiction and death cults.
And thus, old age prowls quietly. As the career of wolverines and wildlife that Garrett pursued after getting married nosedives due to climate crisis, Cece’s career as an independent bookstore owner seems to reach a happy place. Charlie has seen the end of more than a couple of marriages now, and he’s grieving the loss of Jasper, whom he couldn’t save. But Jasper isn’t the only loss readers must endure. First merely understandable confusions, Cece’s day-to-day blunders are diagnosed as Alzheimer’s. By the story’s end, she can’t even remember her husband’s name.
The central actors of Dream State — Charlie, Garrett and Cece — seem to reach their final resting places. When the plot can march no further, Puchner exhumes the past in order to stick the landing. He gives readers the wedding.
Everyone is sick in some way or another: trying not to vomit in the case of Charlie, or wishing they could vomit and somehow cure their existential dread in the case of Garrett and Cece. The scene contains only the ephemera of peace before the axe falls and Cece declares she’s staying in Montana with Garrett, leaving Charlie in California. The novel ends by depicting an interstice of joy in which Cece is young and free, before she becomes addled and aged.
Many reviewers herald Dream State for the way it deftly chronicles time, like a ballerina leaping across a puddle on a rainy day. I am no different than many reviewers — the pacing of this marathon-length novel is certainly why the ending left me stranded in Dream State, my ride home nowhere to be found. However, I admit, the decision to withhold the wedding struck friction with me at first. Then, by the end, I assumed it was a case of “writer knows best,” and I should have been more patient. Puchner’s response in an interview with The News-Letter tells us it’s somewhere in between.
“I originally thought that I would just show the wedding when it was supposed to be shown, right?” Puchner said. “I do a sleight of hand, or a bait and switch [...] [I wanted the end] to move back in time and imagine this other whole ghost life that could have been led, which would have led to a different kind of happiness and unhappiness.”
Puchner said that the ending came to him on a walk in the snow. “I was so happy I cried,” he said.
On Goodreads, one of the genres for Dream State is “Climate Change.” No one can claim that the novel did not discuss the reality of the current climate, particularly in the American West. But the interplay between climate and characters in Dream State is more nuanced than sticker-brand terms like eco-fiction or cli-fi may suggest.
There are novels, whether purposeful or not, where the setting steamrolls the characters; Dream State is not one of those novels. In my reading, the characters seem to come more center stage than ever before in the end: particularly Cece, whose character finalizes itself in readers’ minds ironically through her forgetting her own life. In an interview with The News-Letter, Puchner addresses both of these issues in one fell swoop.
“[It] was impossible to write about Montana and the American West without writing about climate change because it wouldn’t be realism,” Puchner said on the novel’s genre. Later, regarding humans at the end of Dream State and Cece’s Alzheimer’s, Puchner elucidated the connection.
“I started to become interested in the parallels between the sort of loss of memory that [Cece] experiences and the Earth's loss of biodiversity,” Puchner said. “There's something about the devastation of dementia that is maybe rhymed in the devastation that's happening to the earth.”
Puchner said early in the interview that novels don’t need to answer questions. Rather, paraphrasing Chekhov, they must ask eloquent questions. While an answer like that is meaty in terms of interpretation, it makes an interviewer sweat when one of his questions is, essentially, “What is one question you want to be asked about your book, and how would you answer?” Still, I fired away, and he provided a satisfying answer.
“I can't identify a single question that I want the book to ask,” Puchner said. “I guess what I would want someone to ask at the end is, like, ‘Why am I so moved?’ I mean, that sounds pompous, but... the dream of what you want a book to do is... move somebody in a way that is, in some ways, inexpressible.”
When you’re a writer sitting in front of another writer who's responsible for a book you’ve just enjoyed, it’s hard — perhaps impossible — to not talk about writing. Near the end of our interview, I asked Puchner: How can a writer move someone with words beyond words?
“That’s the whole project,” Puchner concluded. “It exists equally in the space between lines as it does the lines themselves.”
For me, that quote defines the experience of reading Dream State. Everything around you will change. You will read more books and live more lives, the environment will continue to change for better or worse, but Dream State will forever be a snapshot of Charlie, Garrett and Cece in the declining Montana. Just as the photographer gets to leave the frame in which the subject is stuck like a mosquito in amber, the writers and readers of books get to step away while the characters are stuck inside the pages. What do you make of this; how do you cope with this? These are the questions that literature is concerned with, from beginning to end.
Returning to my dorm from Hodson Hall, missing the man asking for the lighter, swimming in the prelingual mess of my mind, one question floats above the noise:
Why am I so moved?
