Since I began writing this blog a few years ago, I have discussed relatively few books, but two of them—Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land and Daniel Mason’s North Woods—have boldly presented a narrative that starts in a distant past and culminates in the future. Now I’ve come across another new novel that traces the same arc, Eric Puchner’s Dream State, which begins in a not-so-distant 2004 and concludes fifty or sixty years later. Oprah Winfrey chose Dream State as her latest title for her popular book club, but I read it because my go-to reviewer, Ron Charles of the Washington Post, praised it. Mr. Charles has never steered me wrong, and I also have the highest regard for Oprah’s impeccable taste, so ordering the book was an easy decision. Reading it, however, brought some challenges.
At first we meet Cece Calhoun, who is in rural Montana to plan her imminent marriage to Charlie Margolis, and we assume that Cece is our protagonist. But she turns out to be one of many. She meets Garrett Meek, Charlie’s best friend from college days and the officiant at the wedding, and takes an instant dislike to him, though perhaps her early antipathy springs from the more complicated element of fascination and curiosity. Now Puchner shifts into Garrett’s point of view, and we appear to be reading a story about a budding relationship between Cece and Garrett. But in a rare authorial intrusion, Puchner editorializes, “What a rare story this would be, if we paid no attention to Charlie,” and from there we shift into Charlie’s point of view and then smoothly into a roundelay of shifting relationships as time passes and families grow and children grow up to seize their own narrative space. If all this sounds confusing, then I’m reporting it badly. Puchner keeps us fully grounded in time and space, even if the leaps in time come swiftly and unexpectedly; we get no signals of a time leap in the chapter titles, but we must rather infer them from the action unfolding before us. In the end we have the epic sense of having experienced all these lives as the characters themselves have, with inevitable adjustments to unexpected twists, many of them heartbreaking, many shocking, many gratifying. That Puchner chooses to conclude by taking us back to where he started, with Cece on her wedding day, feels both exactly right and devastatingly ironic now that we know all that is to come.
An even more unconventional narrative comes to us on Netflix in Adolescence, a four-part television series written by the reliable Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham and directed by Philip Barantini. Somehow Jack Thorne has yet to become a familiar household name to American audiences despite his astonishing gifts for creating popular entertainment. He’s the man who gave us Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and Let the Right One In on the stage, Enola Holmes and His Dark Materials on television, and Wonder in the movie theaters. His writing partner for this project, Stephen Graham, appears onscreen in Adolescence in the crucial role of the father of a 13-year-old boy accused of murdering a classmate. And the young actor who plays the accused, Owen Cooper, delivers a letter-perfect performance as a complex kid whose roiling adolescence manifests as sweetness, charm, vulnerability, rage, cunning, and menace.
What makes the series so unconventional, however, is that it does not follow the familiar tropes of storytelling. In Episode 1 we begin with a closeup of a British policeman who is griping to his partner about his trivial annoyances at home. Quickly we learn that he’s in charge of a massive raid on the home of a suspected murderer. He remains central to the narrative through Episode 2, and then he disappears. The same occurs with a sympathetic solicitor who comes to the police station to assist his 13-year-old client; he’s a central character in one episode, and then he vanishes from the story. The outraged friend of the murder victim appears to be destined for a central role in the story, but she makes her appearance in one episode and then never appears again. A psychologist interviewing the 13-year-old prisoner enters and exits the narrative in Episode 3, which consists primarily of a dazzling, claustrophobic interview at a detention center. By the end of the episode, which treats the psychologist with disturbing ambiguity, we squirm as we wonder just what was driving her with some of her questions.
Miraculously, ambitiously, daringly the director Barantini chooses to film each episode as one continuous shot. I remember when the movie Birdman appeared to arrive as one shot, but in fact the creative team for that movie filmed multiple shots and then trick-edited them to make the visuals appear seamless. In the case of Adolescence, however, Barantini literally uses one camera, pushes the record button, and lets the actors go. The performers have to be as disciplined as stage actors with their lines, cues, and blocking, and they all deliver. The camera travels in an out of moving vehicles, circles the performers, tracks different characters, all in real time, and once even takes a ride in a drone to follow a vehicle as it travels from one scene to another. The result is the sense that we’re watching a live documentary that happens to be catching people during devastating trauma. In the end, few of the characters achieve what we would conventionally call a resolution, and yet we all grasp that this particular chapter of their lives has concluded. I have never seen anything like it.