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Stewart: 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. Tonight Eric Puch-- Puchner?

Stewart: Puchner.

Puchner: Puchner. Eric Puchner will be in conversation with Danaw Mengestu at McNally Jackson at the seaport at 6:30pm. Welcome to the show.

Puchner: Thank you so much for having me.

Stewart: So much of the book takes place in Montana. What's your relationship to Montana?

Puchner: My wife and I have been going to Montana for the past 25 years every summer. It's a place that's really near and dear to my heart. In fact 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.

Stewart: Oh, wow.

Puchner: For a while because he was destitute and he survived because a train would come through town and throw coal to him so he could warm himself so he didn't freeze to death. He ended up starting a dry goods store and becoming a successful middle class person in Montana and built this house on Flathead Lake. 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.

Stewart: What did you want the reader to know about Montana? Then what did you want to dispel about Montana?

Puchner: I'm not actually a Montana. I don't live there full-time. 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. 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. This is wildfire smoke, not just in Montana, but also in Washington and Oregon and all drifts eastward. Sometimes the AQI, the air quality index, is in the red and you can't go outside. To see that happen and to see the consequences of global warming 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 an effect on the lake and on the biodiversity and all sorts of things. I wanted to sort of write this pain to this beautiful landscape, but also a bit of analogy for it as well.

Stewart: How would you describe Garrett at the beginning of the book?

Puchner: He is very depressed. He hasn't gotten over a tragedy that happened to a friend of his in college, an accident that I won't give away. It sent him into a spiraling depression where he has become misanthropic and prefers animals to people. Doesn't believe in marriage. A little bit lazily, perhaps, falls into some easy tropes about marriage being a bourgeois construct and that sort of thing. He makes no bones about telling everybody about how he feels about certain things. He's 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.

Stewart: We're gonna try to do this spoiler free.

Puchner: All right. Good. That's good.

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?

Puchner: Charlie wants to continue to be as happy as he is now. He's always imagined life was just like a banquet. 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, "Rise and shine." He leaps out of bed. One of the things that happens in the book is that the book enacts a reversal between these two characters in which Garrett and Charlie 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.

Stewart: Cece. She's come to Montana to get ready for the wedding. Is she a bridezilla?

Puchner: I don't really know what that means.

Stewart: A bridezilla. Godzilla meets a bride. She's getting ready for this wedding. She wants things a certain way.

Puchner: She does, but I don't think it's coming out of an evil place or anything or I don't even think of her as being particularly controlling. She loves this house so much, and she loves this place. Since meeting Charlie, she's imagined getting married there so it's important to her. 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. 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.

Stewart: She thinks it's on the bookstore, but we learn. My guest is Eric Puchner. 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 to 2054. First of all, why 2004?

Puchner: It seemed like the right time. I knew that I wanted a book that would project into the future. Not just because I was interested in the direness of the environmental situation and seeing that play out, but also I just was really interested in old age and watching these characters age. I love books that are about time, and in particular, books whose antagonist is time. A lot of my favorite books-

Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Puchner: -revolve around a house. I love that whole genre of literature. 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 this is what a house represents is like your permanency, a home, a permanent home. 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 environmental situation.

Stewart: As we follow them through life, as I'm reading along, I realize it's have got to be 2054. As we're following them through their life. How did you decide what would be the same in 2054? What would be different?

Puchner: That's a really good question. I'm not a science-fiction writer and I wasn't interested in a perfectly accurate prognosis. That's not my business as a writer. I'm interested in these human beings and what happens to them over time. I knew that the situation would get more dire in terms of the landscape. I knew that. I didn't try to come up with-- it's impossible to predict what technology is going to exist then. 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. I was much more interested-- I wanted to keep the attention on the characters themselves. It is amazing, despite all this technology that we have. We still have the same hopes and dreams that we've always had. We purport to want things that we don't actually want. I feel like human beings stay the same over time.

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.

Puchner: In terms of climate change? 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. 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. Even though there's a chapter in the book in which that's set in LA, it's 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 burned up into Shrinky Dinks and Griffith Observatory was on fire. That was supposed to be 10 years from now.

Stewart: Wow. Would you read a bit for us?

Puchner: Sure.

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.

Stewart: 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 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 Comiefornia, 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.

Stewart: That was Eric Puchner reading from his novel Dream State. 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?

Puchner: I did. That was important to me because the book is about this stunning betrayal that happens between two friends and the woman they both love. I wanted to see how the ramifications of that affected the following generation. That was happening on the individual level. 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.

Stewart: As the characters age, we see one of them gets Alzheimer's. Have you had any experience with Alzheimer's?

Puchner: 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.

Stewart: What did you want people to learn about how Alzheimer's not only affects the person, but also the family?

Puchner: It's an incredibly harrowing experience when a loved one has to [unintelligible 00:13:43] 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. One of the things that I do in the book, which 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. I have these moments sometimes when I have a dog named Georgie, and sometimes Georgie's looking at me with such love and mystification. 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.

Stewart: Was this the book you set out to write?

Puchner: 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. All my first drafts are exploratory.

Stewart: That's interesting.

Puchner: 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. All the writers that I know, all my friends who are writers, they have no idea what's going to happen in their novel or they have some idea. For me, that's the fun part. Also that's the 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.

Stewart: Who's your first reader?

Puchner: Catherine, 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. She's also a writer. She's a wonderful novelist. Catherine Noel. She read the book in its earliest form and it wasn't working then. She told me she made no bones about the fact that the second half was sort of-- 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."

Stewart: You can keep her around.

Puchner: It wasn't working at that point yet and I knew it. It was the first draft.

Stewart: 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?

Puchner: I never show a book 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 defeats the purpose. 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. It's not just my-- I show it to my wife first and second and third and fourth and fifth and sixth, probably, but then I have 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.

Stewart: Eric Puchner has a new novel out. It's called Dream State. It's so good. I read it in two and a half days. It was so good.

Puchner: Thank you so much.

Stewart: We really appreciate you being here.

Puchner: Thank you. It's my pleasure.

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