Oprah’s book club pick, ‘Dream State,’ is a transporting wonder

Maybe it’s not the most sophisticated critical laurel, but Eric Puchner’s new novel, “Dream State,” made me miss my subway stop.

That rarely happens.

Falling asleep on the subway and waking up when my book hits the sticky floor? Yes, that happens with alarming frequency. But looking up from the pages and realizing that, in every sense, I’ve been transported away from where I live is a rare pleasure.

I suspect that’s also the quality that inspired Oprah to choose “Dream State” as the next title for her book club.

Although Puchner’s novel is a long, deep ride that traverses half a century, it never labors under the weight of its broad scope. Instead, with every chapter, the story feels animated only by the spontaneous possibilities of moments in which loyalty is respected or ignored, passion resisted or sated. That vast procession of Schrödinger’s cats, stretched out over the decades, gradually coalesces into a family history that feels monumental.

The novel opens in Montana in the days before a wedding in 2004. Cece, the bride, has arrived a few weeks early at an empty summer home owned by the parents of her fiancé, an irrepressible, universally adored doctor named Charlie Margolis. The guests on either coast aren’t thrilled about having to travel so far, but Cece has loved this homestead for years. For her, the old house is an embodiment of the family she’s about to join. The Margolises “were everything she’d always wanted,” Puchner writes, “a country unto themselves, with their own customs and traditions … Just being around them made Cece instantly happy, even delirious.”

There’s lots to be done before the wedding, of course, so Charlie makes sure his best friend, Garrett, drops by to help. The trouble is, Garrett is a brooding figure with “one of those pitiable mold-length beards, less a fashion choice than a flag of surrender.” Puchner, who treats him tenderly even while laying out his considerable flaws, notes that Garrett’s “heart was a haunted doll living in a box.” Cece understands he’s struggling with something – depression? drugs? bad luck? – but she still wishes Charlie hadn’t asked him to officiate their wedding. The strain of being alone with him feels like just one more chore she has to manage before all the guests arrive. Besides, Garrett’s vague offer to help is blotted out by his dreary pomposity. He scoffs at her taste in books. He criticizes the way she speaks. He claims marriage is a cowardly, joyless trap – “the tomb of love.”

“You must be the most cynical person I’ve ever met,” Cece says.

“You don’t actually like me very much, do you?” Garrett asks.

“No,” she shouts. “I’ve been pretending for Charlie’s sake.”

If you’ve never seen “Much Ado About Nothing” or any subsequent romantic comedy, you’ll be perplexed to learn that when Garrett stumbles home, he “couldn’t remember feeling so happy,” and Cece can’t stop thinking of him.

What we have here is a Montana version of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy in flannel, a confrontation that Puchner carries off with all the requisite charm and humor – and an errant mountain goat. But what can this spark of affection amount to when Cece’s wedding to Garrett’s best friend is just a few days away?

That’s the question the rest of this absorbing novel answers or at least keeps circling around because, honestly, who can know how things might have been or should have been? In subsequent chapters, we keep encountering Cece, Charlie and Garrett as they age and mature, rage and forgive, and endure “the bends of rocketing through the years.” Regrets calcify into granite stepping stones, and all these characters are pursued by nostalgia as though it were some ravenous beast. Eventually, their kids enter the world, too, and must contend with the effects of that long-ago wedding still irradiating their families like a notorious nuclear meltdown.

The book’s effect is hypnotically telescopic, a vision of people we come to know across decades. Puchner’s manipulation of time is among his novel’s most magical elements. Typically, the years pass between chapters, but the children “moved through Summer Time, in which days were really years.” The pages begin to feel like days of a calendar flipping by in the wind.

In one sense, it’s a vertiginous, godlike perspective that allows us to see the erratic way that hopes and dreams germinate or wither on the rough ground of fate; disappointments accrue even as love and friendship persist. Puchner’s narration, which can slip from funny to harrowing as fast as a young man can ski to his death, cradles each of these characters through the vagaries of life. Promising careers sometimes peter out into quiet desperation; dead-end lives suddenly veer into surprisingly fulfilling vocations. And always, there’s each person’s temperament, what Emerson called “the iron wire on which the beads are strung.” Puchner is playing a clever game here, tempting us to imagine that a life’s course can be redirected by a single, startling choice, even as the whole record makes plain that a life is actually the result of a trillion choices and accidents we could not possibly control or calculate.

This structure puts Puchner’s skills as a novelist and a short story writer on parallel display. While exercising full control across the whole arc of the book, he also manages to create strikingly beautiful chapters. At the center of the novel, for instance, we follow the erotically charged relationship between Lana, Garrett’s daughter, and Jasper, Charlie’s son – “her summer ghost-brother.” On its own, this section is a terrific short story, but it also functions as a fulcrum for the whole novel. “How weird life was,” Lana thinks. “There was the song of your life and then there was the mondegreen of it, politely known as adulthood.” I don’t think I’ll ever forget that tragicomic image of adulthood as a misremembered lyric of my actual life. And such petals of insight fall gently on every page of this deeply humane novel.

Even as Puchner records the evolution of these friends and lovers, he never neglects the natural world in which they live. I’m reminded of Daniel Mason’s remarkable novel “North Woods,” which focuses on an ancient farmhouse in western Massachusetts. But while Mason starts 400 years ago and moves into the present day, “Dream State” begins in the early 21st century and moves slyly into the future. This isn’t a work of science fiction, and Puchner has little interest in predicting the technological wonders or political horrors ahead, but he pays close attention to the health of the environment. It’s an affecting reminder that all our choices over the next couple of decades – our marriages, births, affairs, reunions and deaths – will play out in a climate growing increasingly inhospitable.

Bringing these intertwined lives to a close that doesn’t feel too sentimental or too bleak would be a challenge for any writer. We book reviewers don’t get to say much about endings, but Puchner’s final chapter is one of the most touching and satisfying I’ve read in years.

I see you teetering there between choosing to read “Dream State” or not. Jump in.

Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for the Washington Post. He is the book critic for “CBS Sunday Morning.”