This family saga is 100 pages too long — but who cares, the writing's great
I like it when a novel surprises me. So often, it's easy to slot literary narratives into a short list of categories: will-they-won't-they romance, journey to self-knowledge, sad girl millennial lit. By page 50, I can generally tell my thinly disguised autobiographies from my cosy crimes. But Dream State, the American writer Eric Puchner's second novel, went somewhere I wasn't expecting.
We begin in the summer of 2004 in a gorgeous old house on a lakeshore in Montana. It belongs to Cece's future parents-in-law, and she's there to plan her wedding to Charlie. The house is a magical place, a romantic idyll with 'raspberry bushes, magically replenishing, like something in a fairy tale'.
Keeping Cece company while Charlie toils away as a cardiac anaesthetist
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