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I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger (Grove Press, 2024).

Award-winning novelist Leif Enger has a knack for writing about journeys—strange, improbable journeys that leave his characters changed in unforeseen ways. In his first two solo novels, his protagonists made these journeys; in his third, Virgil Wander, his protagonist stayed put while someone else made a journey in his direction. But in his latest, I Cheerfully Refuse, he’s back to his old formula, which—so great is Enger’s talent—still feels fresh and new.

Our hero is Rainy (“My name is Rainier, after the western mountain, but most people shorten it to the dominant local weather”), who lives with his wife, Lark, in a small rural community near Lake Superior. Their life together is generally a contented one, despite the fact that they’re living in a dystopia.

Enger has set his novel in some unspecified future period, in the wake of environmental and political catastrophe—also unspecified. Rather than engage in elaborate worldbuilding, he keeps his focus on the lives and experiences of his handful of characters, giving us only as many details as we need to know about the harsh world surrounding them. There are touches of the grotesque (long-ago drowned corpses keep bobbing up out of the water) and the darkly humorous (children are rated on a Feral Comportment Continuum) and the tragic (a method of suicide called “the Willow” spreads like wildfire), but for the most part, at least until the book’s climax, they’re only touches. It’s a creative and effective choice, as it draws us nearer to those characters and strengthens our belief in their ability to handle whatever that world can throw at them.

Nonetheless, there’s a lot to handle. After Lark takes in an enigmatic boarder named Kellan, who arrives bearing a copy of a book she’s always wanted to read, it turns out that he’s being pursued by dangerous enemies. When those enemies finally trace him to Rainy and Lark’s home, all hell breaks loose, and Rainy is forced to flee on a sailboat with just a few possessions, including his treasured bass guitar.

Against all odds, he convinces himself that he’ll find Lark again if he can just make it to the place where they once took a magical boat trip together. Instead, he does battle with incredibly violent storms, picks up a nine-year-old stowaway, and accidentally discovers that he’s in possession of a deadly cargo.

Given all the obstacles in his way, it would be understandable if Rainy’s journey led him to despair, but it’s simply not in him. Rage, fear, and grief, yes, but not despair. Not for him is the going “in search of better” that’s used as a euphemism for suicide; he’s determined to stay put on Earth and fight things out.

And even something in his violent and repressive universe seems to respect his iron will and strength of character. For every malevolent force that confronts him, from titanic storms to corrupt characters to prison ships, there’s another, benign force that seems to be looking out for his welfare. If at times his being rescued from a jam seems almost too good to be true, one has to concede that, after all, by this time the world owes him a break.

“Our job always and forever was to refuse Apocalypse in all its forms and work cheerfully against it,” Rainy reads in Lark’s precious, long-desired book. Through this captivating tale, Enger makes a strong case that if one must deal with an apocalypse, that’s not a bad way to go about it.

(Cover image copyright Grove Press. Thanks to NetGalley for the advance review copy. All quotations have been checked in the published version.)

Book Links:

I Cheerfully Refuse on Amazon
I Cheerfully Refuse on Bookshop

(Note: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualified purchases.)

Goodreads Links:

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