Montana Madness

I’ve never, ever paid attention to the selections of Oprah Winfrey’s “Book Club.” I vaguely remember dust-ups with James Frey and Jonathan Franzen, but treated it as middlebrow literary gossip about two novelists I’ve never read, and likely never will. Maybe that’s snobby—probably is, especially since today it’s difficult to find websites with even marginally adequate book recommendations. I do take cues from The Irish Times, but haven’t digitally subscribed since that paper’s news/opinion content is among the most noxious in Europe, which is saying something.

How I came across Eric Puchner’s lumbering but riveting new novel Dream State is a mystery, but when it arrived from Amazon the dust cover featured a small “Oprah’s Book Club, 2025,” and that was sort of unseemly—more than gratuitous “blurbs” from other authors on the inside pages or back cover—but if that’s what it takes to sell this novel in airports and train stations, it’s hard to argue with Doubleday’s merchandizing.

Oprah’s a well-documented celebrity, transcending her TV career so adeptly that she’s drawn solicitation from Democratic donors/consultants to run for president—at 71, not that far-fetched, and she’d be a formidable candidate in the reverse-Trump vein—and I can’t think of a more “admired” woman in America today, lapping even such luminaries as Elizabeth Warren, Chelsea Clinton and Kathy Hochul.

Though I never watched her nationally-syndicated show that ran for 25 years, at least intentionally, I did meet the much-younger Oprah one Saturday morning in 1979 when my City Paper colleagues and I were matched against Baltimore’s WJZ-TV station (where she worked at the time) in a softball game on a Johns Hopkins makeshift field. It was a weird scene: the TV personalities, and their ringers, were outfitted in fancy, if garish uniforms while my team wore City Paper t-shirts and cut-offs, and sneakers were optional. Two of the WJZ players—Richard Sher and Marty Bass—were out-of-control cocksuckers, first making fun of our attire, and then vociferously arguing calls at the plate by a disinterested league umpire. When Eric Garland and Franz Lidz—both serious athletes—broke the game open for CP, the opposing team wasn’t, as we said back then, “flattered” and didn’t offer the customary handshakes after the contest.

All but Oprah: I spoke with her between innings (not a celebrity yet) and she was a sweet, engaging and intelligent woman. And fun. No one, except perhaps Oprah, could’ve guessed what fame, wealth and influence would await her in the ensuing decades, but given her vivacious personality—and the bottles of Coke she generously (and furtively) gave members of our team from the WJZ cooler—I was pleased at her success.

As for Puchner’s Dream State—I’m dubious about any story or book with the word “dream” in it, that’s the stuff of teenagers—it’s a 400-page read, sometimes dense, sometimes whimsical, set in the fictional Salish, Montana, where the three main characters Cece, Charlie and Garrett hold court for generations. The novel begins in 2004, as the wedding of Cece and Good Time Charlie (an affable but ever-serious cardiac anesthesiologist, who imagines a legendary career, with Nobel Prizes and universal acclaim) is about to take place, with college-friend, the brainy but misanthropic Garrett as best man. The trio are in their mid-20s, and by the end all over 70, and climate change has made the once-pristine patch of Montana into a morass of fires, unlikely snowstorms, dried-up lakes, etc. Yet Puchner doesn’t slam the reader with overt apocalyptic environmentalism, leaving that as the backdrop to the difficulties of marriage, raising kids, thwarted ambitions, addiction, horrific desert cults and premature death. Garrett dropped out of Middlebury, wracked with guilt over a skiing accident that left a close friend six feet under, and is adrift until, in a charming long sequence, steals Cece away from Charlie.

There’s one passage I especially liked, because it’s so accurate. At the disastrous Cece-Charlie wedding, where half the guests are laid low from norovirus, the party goes on. Puchner writes: “The DJ came on and played Top 40 hits no one had liked when they were released and yet had somehow become sacred relics of their youth. People whooped when each song came on, as if they’d won something in a raffle.” That describes a number of weddings I’ve attended over the years—the bride and groom spending a fortune for their “big day,” renting out an on-the-clock hall, with inedible food and a terrible soundtrack, or even worse, a cover band. And dresses that’ll be worn just once. I never understood it: my own wedding’s music in 1992 was five tapes made by my wife and me, and there wasn’t a dud in the bunch. And the whole affair was pulled off for a relatively modest price, 100 guests invited to a reception at Tribeca’s now-gone El Teddy’s, getting blasted on Mexican beers and margaritas, over by midnight. At noon the next day, we were off to Sardinia and Sicily for a smashing honeymoon.

A picayune quibble about the book. When Cece is first showing signs of memory loss and confusion, she reluctantly accedes to Garrett’s suggestion of seeing a specialist. She’s given reading material: “Practice the five W’s,’ the pamphlet said. Keep a ‘who what when why where’ list of all your activities.” At one time, the Five W’s were drummed into every aspiring journalist’s head: “Who, what, when, where and why.” Gather the facts, and try to decipher why the story is worth pursuing.

In his New York Times review (mixed) of Dream State, Maxim Loskutoff includes this clunker: “Such novels remind us that a mutable self doesn’t end with adolescence, while reflecting our latent, almost Victorian fear of a life not-well-lived—one increasingly dominated by dread over climate change.” Fancy words! But they mean about as much as an interminable Bill Clinton speech from the 1990s. Far more affecting, for example, is how Garrett, a faithful and mostly loving husband, takes care of Cece, obliterated by Alzheimer’s, which begins in her late-60s. Such a human, and common, situation, I think, elicits more “dread” than the unknown ravages of climate change.

—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023