Dream State is a story about crumbling relationships – between best friends, between romantic partners, between parents and children and between the human race and the Earth itself. The relationship that bothered me the most, though, was the one between me and the book. I don’t quite understand why Dream State has received the praise it has — I found Eric Puchner‘s approach to structure and tension frustrating and unsatisfying.
At the outset of the novel, Cece and Charlie are about to get married at his family cottage in Montana – Cece has gone ahead of the ceremony to manage the final details, working with Charlie’s best friend Garrett, who will officiate the event. There’s tension between Cece and Garrett – she’s not sure what to make of him, and he’s carrying a lot of trauma, while being caregiver to his dying father.
Just as things are about to pop off, we skip forward in time.
Eric Puchner has a strange storytelling style in Dream State. Most of the action happens in flashbacks – the story creeps up to a pivotal moment, but just as the tension is about to break, it skips forward in time. Months or years have passed, and we spend time with each main character looking back on the moment that we as readers never actually experienced.
What this resulted in for me was a frustrating story that completely lacked stakes. The big moments never happen and the twists are revealed in retrospect. We get fragments of stories from the characters, through dialogue or through memory sequences, and the reader is left to piece it together over a few chapters (or in one case, several hundred pages).
The three main characters were a mystery to me. Cece is apparently irresistible to the men, but to me she has no charm and no wit. Even the men who love her don’t ever really say what it is about her that they love.
The guys are even less likeable. Garrett is haunted by something that happened in college that derailed his life – it echoes through the rest of his adulthood, and his decisions erratic and motivations unclear. Charlie is determined to be a legendary cardiac anaesthesiologist, and I struggled to see what made him appealing other than his lucrative career.
It’s also unclear why they ever like spending time with each other. It’s baffling why there is such a strong magnetism between any two of them at any given time.
The next generation is more interesting – Lana is a glorious weirdo, a sexually liberated bisexual filmmaker. Jasper is a troubled kid with attachment and substance issues. Both are compelling and underutilised: the narrative structure skips over critical moments in their relationship with each other and with their families, to the detriment of the story.
I almost gave up on this at the halfway mark, but several reviews on Goodreads credit the last 20% of the book as redemption for the filler in the middle. While it was surely more engaging than what precedes it, it wasn’t enough to get the bad taste out of my mouth.
I’m clearly in the minority here, as the professional critics pretty much universally loved the book. Perhaps it was the format of the story that rubbed me the wrong way, or maybe if I’d read some of Puchner’s other books I’d have received this one more warmly.
