← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Author Eric Puchner's Novel, 'Dream State'
00:17:35
Called "gritty, glittering and exuberant" by the Boston Globe, the new novel, Dream State, tells the story of love and family over a 50 year period. We speak to author Eric Puchner.
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- [00:00]
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- [00:36]
Alison Stewart
Yeah, seriously. This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. In the world created in the novel Dream State, Montana is a place of great beauty and a place of natural disasters. The same could be said of its three protagonists, Garrett, Charlie and CeCe. When Charlie asks Cece to get married in his summer home in Salish, Montana, she agrees. His college friend Garrett will officiate, although he doesn't really believe in marriage or the future of the planet. When CeCe meets Garrett, she doesn't care for him that much, but she knows it'll make Charlie happy if they can manage to get along over 50 years. Dream State follows this trio, their kids, their hopes and dreams and nightmares. Dream State is called by Kirkus sprawling and elegant, a novel that feels both old fashioned and bracingly inventive. It was just announced yesterday that Oprah's Book Club they picked it and tonight Eric Buckner Puckner Eric Puckner will be in conversation with Danam and Guestu at McNally Jackson at the seaport at 6:30pm welcome to the show.
- [01:43]
Eric Puckner
Thank you so much for having me.
- [01:44]
Alison Stewart
So much of the book takes place in Montana. What's your relationship to Montana?
- [01:49]
Eric Puckner
Well, my wife and I have been going to Montana for the past 25 years every summer. So it's a place that's really near and dear to my heart. And in fact the house that the house in the book is based upon because the book cover spans about 50 years in the life of these characters but also this house, that house is based on my father in law's house. His grandfather built it in the 30s. He was a Lithuanian immigrant who came over and actually lived in a packing crate for a while because he was destitute. He survived because the train would come through town and throw coal to him so he could warm himself so he didn't freeze to death. And he ended up starting a dry goods store and becoming a successful middle class person in Montana and built this house on Flathead Lake. And so yeah, we've been visiting for years. It was out of the family for a while and then my father in law saw that it was on the market and he walked through the door and said I'll take it to the astonished real estate agent because he spent his boyhood at this house.
- [02:53]
Alison Stewart
What did you want the reader to know about Montana? And then what did you want to dispel about Montana?
- [03:01]
Eric Puckner
Well, I mean, I'm not actually a Montana. I don't live there full time. Right. So I feel like, because it's a landscape that's so important to me and that has meant so much to me over the past 25 years, one of the things I wanted to capture in the book was that the fact that it's also a landscape in peril. So probably for the past seven years, when we go out there, we sometimes don't know whether we're going to have to spend three or four days inside because the wildfire smoke is so bad. And this is wildfire smoke, not just in Montana, but also in Washington and Oregon, and all drifts eastward. So sometimes the aqi, the air quality index, is in the red and you can't go outside. So to see that happen and to see the consequences of global warming sort of writ large on the landscape, the fact that the snow melt is getting smaller and smaller every year, less and less, and it's having effect on the lake and on the biodiversity and all sorts of things. So I wanted to sort of write this pain to this beautiful landscape, but also a bit of analogy for it as well.
- [04:15]
Alison Stewart
How would you describe Garrett at the beginning of the book?
- [04:19]
Eric Puckner
Well, he is very depressed, so he hasn't gotten over a tragedy that happened to a friend of his in college, an accident that I won't give away. And it sent him into kind of a spiraling depression where he has become misanthropic and prefers animals to people, doesn't believe in marriage, sort of, you know, a little bit lazily, perhaps, falls into some, you know, easy tropes about marriage being, you know, a bourgeois construct and that sort of thing. And he makes no bones about, you know, telling everybody about how he feels about certain things. And he's a wounded. A wounded soul. And he doesn't actually end up being able to find himself and discover his true vocation in life until later in the book.
- [05:14]
Alison Stewart
We're gonna try to do this spoiler free.
- [05:16]
Eric Puckner
Okay? All right, good. That's good.
- [05:18]
Alison Stewart
I think that's a good thing, actually. Charlie is Garrett's friend from college. Charlie is the good doctor when we first meet him. What does Charlie want out of life?
- [05:28]
Eric Puckner
Charlie wants to continue to be as happy as he is now. And he's always imagined life was just sort of like a banquet And I think that he feels that. Not that he necessarily deserves happiness, he just hasn't really. He wakes up every morning and he says, you know, rise and shine. He leaps out of bed. And so one of the things that happens in the book is that the book enacts a kind of reversal between these two characters in which Garrett and Charlie sort of change, not just because of a twist of fate, but because of something that maybe they don't even fully understand in their own characters. They undergo a reversal in terms of what happens to them in the future.
- [06:12]
Alison Stewart
Cece. She's come to Montana to get ready for the wedding. Is she a bridezilla?
- [06:17]
Eric Puckner
I don't really know what that means, a bridezilla.
- [06:20]
Alison Stewart
Godzilla meets a bride. She's getting ready for this wedding. She wants things a certain way, sort of.
- [06:26]
Eric Puckner
She does, but I don't think it's coming out of an sort of evil place or anything, or. I don't even think of her as being particularly controlling. She loves this. This house so much, and she loves this place. And she's always imagined, sort of. Well, since meeting Charlie, she's imagined getting married there. So it's important to her. But I also think that she's trying to exert so much control because inside, she feels like she's not sure about what she's doing. And she is a med school dropout who wants to do something great in life, but has yet to figure out exactly what that will be.
- [07:01]
Alison Stewart
She thinks it's on the bookstore, but we learn. My guest is Eric Pukner. Yeah, got it. The book is called Dream State. We follow the trio in the book for decades, starting out in 2004. So we go almost like, to 2054. First of all, why 2004?
- [07:24]
Eric Puckner
It seemed like the right time. I knew that I wanted a book that would project into the future, and not just because I was interested in the direness of the environmental situation and sort of seeing that play out. But also, I just was really interested in old age and watching these characters age. And I'm also. I love books that are about time and in particular, books whose antagonist is time. A lot of my favorite books.
- [07:56]
Alison Stewart
Oh, interesting.
- [07:57]
Eric Puckner
Revolve around a house. I love that whole genre of literature, so, you know, Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson or Light Years by James Salter, or To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. There's something about houses in fiction that cover a lot of time where it's extremely poignant to me that the characters build these houses as if they're trying to create a permanent place on Earth. This is like, you know, this is what a house represents, is sort of like, you know, your permanency. A home, a permanent home. But of course, we all know that there is no such thing on Earth as a permanent home and that we're just passing through. And that becomes especially compounded by the.
- [08:38]
Alison Stewart
Environmental situation as we follow them through life. As I'm reading along, I realize it's gotta be 2054, right? As we're following them through their life. How did you decide what would be the same in 2054? What would be different?
- [08:55]
Eric Puckner
Well, that's a really good question. I'm not a science fiction writer and I wasn't interested in, like, a perfectly accurate sort of prognosis that wasn't. That's not my business as a writer. I'm interested in these human beings and what happens to them over time. So I knew that the situation would get more dire in terms of the landscape. So I knew that. I didn't try to come up with. I mean, it's impossible to predict what sort of technology is going to exist then. So I didn't completely ignore it. There's a phone called an origami that folds up in neat little shapes and that sort of thing. But I was much more interested. I wanted to keep the attention on the characters themselves. And it is amazing, despite all this technology that we have, I mean, we still have the sort of same hopes and dreams that we've always had. We purport to want things that we don't actually want. I feel like, you know, human beings stay the same over time.
- [09:55]
Alison Stewart
The book is a real reality check on climate change. Was there one specific issue you knew you wanted to include in Dream state.
- [10:03]
Eric Puckner
In terms of climate change? Yeah. I mean, I wrote the book, I finished the book well before the fires in la. So some people have asked me, oh, God, you're so prophetic. I'm like, I'm not prophetic in the least. Everyone knew this was coming. It's amazing to me that people thought it wasn't going to come. And in fact, as I was writing the book, because it took me years to write, and going to Montana every year and watching things actually exceed people's expectations for how bad they could get. It was getting hotter than people thought. Over 100 in the summer, which is very rare in Montana, and watching the wildfire smoke get worse and worse, I had to actually make things worse. As I was rare, I had to go back and change things and make them more dire. So even though there's A chapter in the book in which that's set in la. It's a brief. A brief chapter, but it's set in la. And there's an allusion to a fire in Griffith Park. And the Hollywood sign has sort of burned up into shrinky dinks. And Griffith Park Observatory is on. Griffith Observatory was on fire. And that was supposed to be 10 years from now.
- [11:14]
Alison Stewart
Wow. Would you read a bit for us?
- [11:17]
Eric Puckner
Sure.
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Alison Stewart
I think it's page 288. I'll give people a sense of what you're writing about. In Dream State. This is Eric Puchner.
- [11:24]
Eric Puckner
Garrett drove past the Salish post office and crested the hill leading into town, normally their first view of the lake. But they could barely make out the boat slips in the marina, so thick was the haze of smoke. It was a terrible time for a reunion. The AQI had been in the 300s all week, so high that they were warning you not to leave the house. There was a local fire in Finley Point. Several too. Several too, in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. But mostly the smoke was from farther west, from Oregon and Washington, blowing eastward on the jet stream. Secondhand smoke, they called it around here, joking about migration from Commifornia, by which they meant the entire West Coast. Even the smoke wants to move to Montana. July and August were the worst. It was like huffing an ashtray. Your eyes burned, you could taste the smoke. Just driving to the store might give you a migraine. Recently, on top of losing his voice. And though he'd never had asthma in his life, Garrett had begun to wheeze, feeling the ghost of his father. No doubt all those summers in the field had taken their toll. The only plus side to the smoke was that the tourists had thinned out a bit, deciding it wasn't worth leaving Seattle or Portland for. A week spent indoors, huddled around the air purifier. Health wise, they were better off in New Delhi. Though of course, there were always locals determined to recreate on the lake, no matter what. Blasting music from pontoon boats or doing donuts on their Waverunners shrouded in a yellow gray fog of smoke. Astonishing what people learn to live with.
- [12:51]
Alison Stewart
That was Eric Buckner reading from his novel Dream State. You know, because this covers so much time, we get to meet the kids of the three protagonists and we follow them as they grow up. Did you want to investigate anything about generational differences?
- [13:08]
Eric Puckner
I did. That was important to me because the book is about this sort of stunning betrayal that happens between two friends and the woman they both love. And I wanted to see how the ramifications of that affected the following generation. So that was happening on the individual level, and then I also wanted on the collective level to talk about or to address the ways in which the choices that we're making and the mistakes we're making are affecting the next generation.
- [13:46]
Alison Stewart
As the characters age, we see one of them gets Alzheimer's. Have you had any experience with Alzheimer's?
- [13:52]
Eric Puckner
I have. Unfortunately, that was one of the things I didn't need to research very much in the book, as my mother died of Alzheimer's.
- [13:59]
Alison Stewart
What did you want people to learn about how Alzheimer's not only affects the person, but also the family?
- [14:08]
Eric Puckner
Well, I mean, it's an incredibly harrowing experience when a loved one has to dementia like that and has Alzheimer's in particular. I think it was important to me. I wrote this soon after my mother died, and she was in my thoughts all the time. So one of the things that I do in the book, which sort of makes me proudest as a writer, is that I actually enter. I don't want to say who it is in the book that gets Alzheimer's, but I enter that person's perspective for a little while. It's brief, but I actually try to evoke what that experience must have been like for her. Obviously, this character isn't my mom, but the impulse to do that, I think, came from a pretty deep place because there is. It's so inscrutable. You know, I have these moments sometimes when I have a dog named Georgie, and sometimes Georgie's looking at me with such love and sort of mystification, and it reminds me so much of looking into my mom's eyes when I was a child. Like, we want to communicate with each other so badly, and we want to tell each other we love each other so much. But you can't. There's. You can't. Yeah.
- [15:28]
Alison Stewart
Was this the book you set out to write?
- [15:31]
Eric Puckner
Well, yes and no. I don't know if I had an idea in mind of exactly the book that I wanted to write, I probably wouldn't have written it, because that doesn't interest me. You know, all my first drafts are exploratory.
- [15:45]
Alison Stewart
That's interesting.
- [15:46]
Eric Puckner
Yeah. Nabokov famously said that you're an amateur if you don't have your entire book mapped out perfectly. He used to do it on note cards, write every chapter. He knew exactly what was going to happen. But, I mean, all the writers that I know, all my friends who are writers, they have no idea what's going to happen in their novels or they have some idea. But for me that's the fun part and also that's the sort of alive part. I feel like if I don't surprise myself as I'm writing the novel, I'm not going to surprise a reader. It's also not going to hold my interest for five years.
- [16:21]
Alison Stewart
Who's your first reader?
- [16:23]
Eric Puckner
Katherine, my wife is always my first reader. Not just with books. She sometimes reads tricky emails as well. We've had them with each other. So she's also a writer. She's a wonderful novelist. Catherine Noel. So yeah, she read the book in its earliest form and it wasn't working then. And she told me she made no bones about the fact that the second half was sort of. Yeah, basically she said something like, it's amazing that you can read something and the sentences are so good, but the book isn't working at all.
- [16:57]
Alison Stewart
So you can keep her around.
- [17:00]
Eric Puckner
Yeah, right. It wasn't working at that point yet and I knew it. I mean, it was a first draft.
- [17:04]
Alison Stewart
So you said the book. Writing a book can be a solitary and hugely collaborative depending on what stage of the process you're in. What was collaborative? What was solitary?
- [17:15]
Eric Puckner
Well, I never show a book until I've. Or a story until I've finished a first draft. If I know what the problems are, there's really no point in me showing it to somebody else. It sort of defeats the purpose. But it's when you know there's something wrong with it but you're having trouble identifying what those problems are that that's the time to show it to somebody. And it's not just my, you know, I show it to my wife first and second and third and fourth and fifth and sixth probably. But then I have, you know, coterie of friends who I've in grad school or when I was at Stanford who read it for me as well. And I do the same for them.
- [17:51]
Alison Stewart
Eric Puckner has a new novel out. It's called Dream State. It's so good. I read it in like two and a half days. It was so good.
- [18:00]
Eric Puckner
Thank you so much.
- [18:01]
Alison Stewart
We really appreciate you being here.
- [18:03]
Eric Puckner
Thank you. It's my pleasure.
- [18:05]
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