Spiky Cece who is in love, has arrived early at her in-laws’ beautiful lake house in Salish, Montana, to finish planner her wedding to Charlie, a cardiac anaesthesiologist with a brilliant future. Charismatic and generous doctor Charlie Margolis, a Swede Levov descendant asks Garrett, a depressed baggage handler at the local airport and his best friend from college, to officiate the wedding. Great-hearted Charlie hopes to reinvigorate melancholic, near misanthropic Garrett, and he wants him and Cece to hit it off, so encourages to spend time together before he arrives for the wedding. Quirky Cece immediately don’t like Garrett, but spends time with him and his gruff mask slips, she grows increasingly uncertain about her future, leading to an impulsive decision that will alter the three friends’ lives forever – the events of summer of 2004, reverberating across fifty years and spanning generations. Dream State is at once an elegy to the endangered West, a study of the unholy catastrophe of marriage and a tender ode to the enduring beauty of friendship. Stories that mess with the wedding plot -beginning rather than ending with a union – introduce the very kinds of confusion betrayal and division that, nuptials resolve. Charlie unexpectedly invites Cece and Garrett back into his life, nine years since they ran away together. Cece and Garrett are struggling young parents hard-scrabbling for meaningful work. He’s a wildlife conservationist, and she’s waiting tables while wanting more, which eventually leads to her opening an independent bookstore. Charlie is a doctor with beautiful Greek wife and a son contemporaneous to Cece and Garrett’s daughter.

At the reunion Charlie never bringing up what happened on that wedding weekend, but when he and Cece go lake swimming, he suddenly holds her under the water. He does this just long enough for her to begin worrying, but not long enough for her to struggle or say something to Charlie or to Garrett. This literary kind of human behaviour rather than something more believable.  Later on in the novel, a silent mutual chokehold between an increasingly dysfunctional Charlie and a stable, successful Garrett. At one point Charlie had contemplated killing Garrett for stealing his fiancée, but the narrator says “ Of course, he would never kill anyone. Not in a million years. But killing himself was another issue. This was the durable fantasy…”

There is talk of climate change and the prospect of forest fires, and also cogent, paragraph about all the terrible things happening in less privileged parts of the world that, as the decades pass on higher end of American life, make the characters feel dutifully guilty for just having to deal with work and family failings and the merciless ravages of addiction and ageing.

Dream State by Eric Puchner, Doubleday $28/Sceptre £20, (published in the UK on May 8) 448 pages