Male friendship is a song without words
Eric Puchner's 'Dream State' attempts to pierce the cocoon of male friendship. But Garrett and Charlie end up emasculated and eclipsed by the female protagonist.
“She’d thought true love was about being understood: about finding that person who could see the sadness in you, the peep show of crazy you kept from everyone else. But what if it was better to be misunderstood? Not to be reminded all the time, just by looking at your partner’s face, that the peep show was there? What if love wasn’t about sharing yourself completely, about yoking your secret sorrow to another’s but about finding someone who made you forget yourself?”
—Eric Puchner in Dream State
Eric Puchner says he sought to write a novel about male friendship, a topic that’s largely been neglected by contemporary literature, perhaps a corollary of the vanishing straight male fiction writer. In Dream State, a story that spans 50 years and 429 pages, largely in the confines of a resplendent summer lake house in deceptively tranquil Montana — “music trampolining off the lake … the splash of waves slurping the dock” — the best friendship between Charlie and Garrett sets the stage for the ultimate life-defining betrayal. But the staggering act of disloyalty (spoiler below) does not disintegrate the relationship as one would expect. Instead of severance, there’s a strange fortification of a bond for reasons Puchner cleverly leaves us to ponder.
Some of the most poignant scenes between Charlie and Garrett occur within a familiar construct where straight men are permitted to forge their deepest bonds and melt their crucible of vulnerabilities: When they’re intoxicated. But even the fog of inebriation has its revelatory limits.
“Male friendship was all about rhythm,” Puchner writes. “It was a kind of song without words, an instrumental you knew by heart, you learned the rhythm together and practiced it all the time, for days and months and years, perfecting it by feel, it was the swing of your silences, the karaoke track behind the gibberish you sang. The rhythm itself said the important things, the non-jokey things, so you wouldn’t have to. Still, there were times like this, rare ones, when it wasn’t enough.”
Even at work deep in the woods scouting wolverines when Garrett professes aloud to a field partner that he can’t stop thinking about his wife and daughter, his private thoughts are trained on how much he misses Charlie, burdened by “a kind of loneliness … that no one else could fill. “There were different forms of love in the world,” he ponders in silence, “why did the romantic kind always bully its way to the front?”
Later, when Garrett ruminates on the close connection formed while working long