THE STATES

A woman turns to dreams to relive her life differently in Woodsey’s speculative novel.

Tildy Sullivan is the middle daughter of a wealthy New York family in decline. Her father, the third-generation scion of a cosmetics empire, is on the verge of bankruptcy. Her two sisters are shallow and oblivious sponges. Her data scientist mother is dead, having left Tildy an AI assistant named Russell and her stock in the family company. Tildy has followed in her mother’s footsteps—she, too, works in data science, and she lives in the dead woman’s apartment. Tildy is single and still pining over Aidan, the man she loved and lost eight years prior during a sojourn in the family’s ancestral home of Ireland. One day, Tildy notices an online ad requesting participants for a lucid-dreaming study. She leaps at the opportunity, seeing it as a chance to reunite with Aidan in her dreamworld: “It could be like time travel,” she thinks, “only better—there [are] no consequences, no social cost. What if her days of failure with her family, the monotony at work, and the regret in her peaceful moments [are] only half her life? What if, at night, she could go to Ireland and do all that she wished, without having to face who she had been, or who she had become?” She soon finds herself in Dream Galway, working as an instructor at the local university, spending time with her Nana at the family cottage, and rekindling her love for Aidan. As Tildy tries to relive happier times in the dream world, her father pursues his interest in selling the family’s land in Galway to make some cash, and Aidan is now a chef with his own famous restaurant. Can Tildy find the satisfaction she desires in her lucid dreams? More importantly, can she translate it to waking life?

Woodsey’s prose is oneiric even in the novel’s waking portions. The lucid dreams are elegantly rendered, as here, when Tildy returns to Galway in her sleep: “The cool air tumbled to her, ripe with the familiar tang of coastal plants and the open sea. She looked around, her eyes watering. It felt like more than a dream here, more even than reality. Like she had voyaged into the heart of the ache she carried within her.” The premise is an intriguing one, and the hard-edged satire with which Woodsey handles Tildy’s family and life in New York is a treat. The scenes (both dreamed and real) set in the Emerald Isle are portrayed with the gauzy sentimentality Irish Americans often adopt with regard to the west of Ireland; Woodsey seems to be commenting on this sort of escapist fetishization, but the satire here is subtler. The supporting characters are sometimes thinly drawn, and the book has occasional pacing issues. Despite these minor flaws, however, the novel casts a definite spell over the reader, who can’t help but be drawn into Tildy’s fantasies. It’s a triple escape, after all: into a dream, over the sea, to the arms of a lost love.

An inventive novel about wishes and regret.