Dream State

Eric Puchner builds this novel around a betrayal that happens before the wedding it was meant to serve — the best man asked to look after the bride ends up loving her instead — and then spends fifty years tracing what that single deviation does to a family. The Montana lake house setting, the slow creep of climate change on the landscape, and the accumulating fallout of addiction and divorce could easily tip into schematic family-saga territory, but critics have singled out Puchner's control of time as the real achievement: decades compress and dilate without the book ever feeling padded. What keeps the characters from becoming vehicles for theme is that they stay capable of surprising themselves, not just the reader — nobody here behaves like a chess piece moved by the plot's larger design.