Dream State by Eric Puchner

 genre: contemporary fiction

There is a small house by a lake in Montana.  The groom, who has spent the summers of his life here, has loved this property since before he could remember and the decision to have his wedding here was easy.  The bride was more than willing, loving this part of the world herself now that she felt connected to it.  But in the time before the wedding, while the bride is in the house alone to prepare for the big day, the way the bride's inner world and self had been aligned...shifts.  One person that she meets is going to scramble up her perfect plans and the way that summer shakes down will make it be a summer whose influence will ripple through generations.  That beautiful place and these people that love it are at the heart of this story of relationships  - both romantic and not (although the non-romantic ones are just as precious and almost more important).

It's been a while since a book was so hauntingly sad and so beautifully written.   The writing is luscious and introspective.  It made me think and despair and I don't know what it was about it that kept me so invested.  The changing climate, the reality of how complex the webs between people can be, the hope for something beautiful, maybe all of that. But the beauty was in the words, the way the story was told, sometimes even tiny moments of clarity - not in what actually happened.  Sometimes what actually happened was deeply upsetting or disgusting or confusing.   And yet.  It all connected.  The humans and how they treated the world and how the world changed as a result.  I actually liked this story's narrative device of skipping forward in chunks of time so you read about important things in bits and memories and impact.

While the bride is a big part of this story, I'd say it feels way less a story about her than about the men in her life.  Not that it's a bad thing, at all, just maybe different from what I usually read.  Every once and a while I'd read a paragraph that felt so thick with the male experience that it caught me off guard a little.  It made me think about how I rarely read literary novels by men and ABOUT men.  Which I'm not judging about myself, just noticing.

To sum up: it is sad.  It is beautiful.  It is a warning.  It is an acknowledgement that we should cherish what we have, both individually and as a human race, because we never know what is fleeting.