Dream State - Softcover

Puchner, Eric

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798217161836

Verlag: Random House Large Print Publishing, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

“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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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One

A visitor to Charlie Margolis’s house in Montana—which really belonged to his parents, who spent their summers there—might not have found it much to look at. The house was cramped and musty and low ceilinged. There was beige carpet from the seventies, bric-a-brac on every windowsill, secondhand furniture that smelled incurably of smoke. Someone had taped a hand-drawn sketch of a mallard to the lintel above the stairs, reminding you to duck. Board games, stacked into ziggurats, cluttered the floor. An antique sign—sweet cherries u-pick-m—hung on the wall of the narrow kitchen, where every appliance was brown. Brown was the stove. Brown was the refrigerator. Brown, brown were the microwave and dishwasher. Brown was the toaster but rarely its toast, which popped up at random, unforeseeable intervals, like a jack-in-the-box. There was a charming porch—recently rebuilt, with a gorgeous prospect of the lake—and yet you couldn’t soak in the view, or hear the wakes of speedboats lapping the beach, because the yard was cut off from the shore by a major trucking route. (The whoosh of semis and logging trucks, the fart of Harleys speeding by, was the sound of summer.)

Still, Cece loved it more than any place on earth. There were orchards behind the house, ancient apple trees planted by Mr. Margolis’s grandfather, varieties of fruit with names like racehorses: Sweet Sixteen and Hidden Rose and Northern Spy. There was a hammock where you could lie in the shade and read while sun flickered through the pines. There were raspberry bushes, magically replenishing, like something in a fairy tale. (In July you could go at them like a machine—fill six, seven buckets—and the bushes wouldn’t look any different.) And the cherries! Somehow there always seemed to be a tree within reach. Fingers stained red, bloated with fruit, you’d run across Route 30 and jump into the lake to clean off, whooping lustily at the cold, feeling like a character in a Russian novel. At least that’s the way Cece felt, as if she’d opened a door in her imagination, entered some pre-digital world where lusty whooping was all the rage. She loved the place as much as Charlie did. They loved it so much they were getting married there, more than a thousand miles from home. Some of their friends were upset—it was expensive to fly in from either coast, and not at all easy—but Cece didn’t care. She couldn’t imagine getting married anywhere else.

Now here she was, her first day in the house by herself. She’d flown out from LA a month early. Charlie’s parents were back home in Culver City, and of course Charlie couldn’t leave the hospital for more than a week: he was a cardiac anesthesiologist, fresh off his fellowship and tethered to the OR. So it was up to Cece to make sure the wedding came off. To save money—but mostly because it felt more genuine to her—she was planning the whole thing herself. She stared at her laptop, combing the pictures of square dance callers before snagging on one that featured a young guy in a cowboy hat looking vaguely hungover. She was attracted to the wedding band’s name, Rod-O and the Feckless Fiddlers. That was the advice she’d been given about square dance bands: the more ridiculous the name, the better it would be.

“What does the ‘O’ stand for?” she asked Rod-O on the phone. A TV blared in the background. The band she’d originally booked—the Fiddle Faddle Stringtet—had canceled the week before.

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just liked the way it sounded. I’m from Mamaroneck, New York. I needed something to stand out.”

“You’re not even a real Montanan?”

“What’s ‘real’ even mean these days?”

Cece frowned. “Can you turn down your TV for a second? It’s very loud.” It sounded, from the British accents, like he was watching Masterpiece Theatre. At ten in the morning.

“I was a struggling nutritionist. Now I’m a square dance caller. It’s all part of the cosmic wheel of life.”

“Are you free on July seventeenth? That’s the date of the wedding.”

“I’ll have to check my schedule. It’s a busy summer. There’s a festival in Burlap.”

“Burlap?”

“That’s the name that springs to mind.”

“Can you look into it, then, and call me back?”

“Hang on. This will only take a second. Doot da doo. Okay, looks like, hmm, yes, might have to juggle some things around . . . I’ll have to run it by the Fiddlers, but I can probably swing it.”

Cece hung up, wondering if Rod-O was displacing his own fecklessness onto his fiddlers. But she was determined to give people the benefit of the doubt, particularly in a place she didn’t know or live in.

Salish, Montana, was one of those western towns caught in a strange moment of transition. It had begun as a Native American trading post, then had reinvented itself for many years as a logging center, and recently had reinvented itself once again as a thriving tourist destination for outdoor recreators. There was a microbrewery and a sushi place called How We Roll and a cycle shop with an espresso bar, but there was also a gun store and a bar called the Stagger Inn and a pawnshop whose employees talked openly about “faggots.” At the Lazy Bear Bar & Grill, you could go to Margarita Monday and find a sales consultant and a fishing guide or two and occasionally even an actual cowboy. But mostly you’d find people who’d washed in from larger cities—in search of fun or outdoorsiness or a different-but-not-too-different life—and didn’t know quite what they were doing there. Like Rod-O on the phone, they had a bit of a tough time explaining who they were.

Cece changed into her bathing suit and walked down to the dock, darting across the highway when there was a gap in traffic. Even at ten o’clock, there was a steady stream of SUVs and semitrucks and rental cars. But the rush of the road evaporated as soon as she crossed the boatshed lawn and got to the lake, which steamed quietly in the sun. The water was so bright she had to squint. The Mission Mountains rose to the left of her, bristling with pines, and then farther across the blue expanse of water were the overlapping peaks of the Salish range, hovering like a mirage. Cece, before coming here three years ago, had never seen anything like it. She’d grown up in LA, where the only “lakes” were artificial, the water—if you could even get to it—murky and opaque. The water in Salish Lake was so clear that you could see straight down to the rocks, picking out minnows and lost lures as if they were at the bottom of a swimming pool. The swim ladder shone as brightly below the surface as above it; in fact, the submerged half looked somehow sharper, truer to the eye, though the two halves didn’t match up. It was like a more perfect world that had snapped off from the first.

Cece dove into the lake, then popped up hooting at the cold. In Montana, you hooted in the morning and whooped after lunch. Or so Cece postulated to herself. She enjoyed coming up with aphorisms like this and was indifferent, as a rule, to their truthfulness. She floated on her back for a while in the steaming water and then climbed up the ladder, shivering in the sun. Vigorously, she grabbed a towel from one of the Adirondack chairs and dried her hair. A man was standing on the lawn, watching her from the base of the dock. She should have been startled, even frightened, except that the lake...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Large Print Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 13: 9798217161836
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 592
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Harder; https://www.edel.com; ; Neum�hlen 17; Hamburg; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland