Dream State by Eric Puchner

I really enjoyed reading this book--and did so on a trip into the northwest corner of Argentina to explore the high altitude wineries there. It is spectacular and varied terrain, with the Andes as a back drop, and the perfect sort of dream state to read this book, set in Montana and spans a half century, much of it into the future. The novel opens in the days before a wedding in 2004. Cece, the bride, has arrived a few weeks early at an empty summer home owned by the parents of her fiancé, an irrepressible, universally adored doctor named Charlie Margolis. The guests on either coast aren’t thrilled about having to travel so far, but Cece has loved this homestead for years. For her, the old house is an embodiment of the family she’s about to join, who are "everything she’d always wanted.” That is the story she told herself, but when she is ferried around by Garrett, Charlie's prickly and reclusive best man, who has absolutely nothing and even that he does not want to talk about, Cece finds that she cannot stop thinking about him. So on the one hand, it is a story often told, where the wedding is called off and the bride runs away with the best man--on the other hand, it is quite different, because it is about how that choice, impulsively made, plays out over the next few decades. The choice of going in to the future is one I don't quite understand. Other than the degrading environment, the future is not much talked about--other than that we still seem to be a democracy which in 2025 seems like an open question. May it be true.