BookBrowse Reviews I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger

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While some may find its earnestness cloying, Leif Enger's I Cheerfully Refuse is an absorbing adventure novel with a fully realized setting and a wholehearted embrace of hope.

Set around Lake Superior in the Upper Midwest, I Cheerfully Refuse depicts a near-future America that has collapsed to the point where it more closely resembles the past. The coasts are the domain of the all-powerful trillionaire ruling class, known as "astronauts" for how untouchable they are to the common man. The rest of the country has been ravaged by climate disaster, widespread illiteracy, and exploitative capitalism. Highways are ill-maintained and plagued by bandits; the internet is functionally non-existent; the waters of Lake Superior are populated by scrawny mutant fish. Our protagonist, a gentle giant of a man named Rainy, still has plenty to live for: playing bass at the local bar, steaming cups of coffee, his saintly book-collecting wife Lark. Others aren't so lucky, and go in search of something better with a popular euthanasia drug called "Willow."

The first part of the novel, which establishes this milieu of cozy desperation, is the strongest. Rainy and Lark may be happy despite everything, but Enger takes pains to illustrate just what "despite everything" means. He fills in the margins with tart, George Saunders-esque satire of late capitalism, including a proudly illiterate president and a law called "the Employers Are Heroes Act" that essentially legalizes indentured servitude. He relates Lark's efforts to save as much literature as she can with admiration, but never lets us forget the pigheaded devaluation of the arts that made such an undertaking necessary to begin with. When one of Rainy's best friends takes a tab of Willow and calmly waits for death, Enger writes with nothing but empathy for an ailing man who sees a world "running out of everything, especially future." "Doing the dishes [before taking Willow] was so pleasant I almost changed my mind," says Rainy's friend. But he doesn't, and it's easy to understand why.

As effective as the scene-setting is, it's still only a quarter of the novel. After Lark is murdered in a home invasion, Rainy embarks upon a sailboat journey to the Slate Islands of Lake Superior, both to escape the dangerous men who killed her and to seek a kind of spiritual reunion with her at a place that was special to them. Along the way, he forms a cat-and-mouse dynamic with one of his pursuers, is beset by storms and gales, and forges an unlikely friendship with a headstrong young girl escaping her abusive guardian. His journey is filled with striking, memorable details and setpieces, captured with imagination and verve by Enger: a sinister character who owns a cross made of "two automatic rifles," a forsaken island whose populace paints murals of their dead, and a harrowing stealth mission to circumvent a tyrannical toll booth operator.

I Cheerfully Refuse, as its title suggests, is a book intended as a missive against the status quo, which is to say a missive against hopelessness. In response to those who say Willow takers are going "in search of someplace better," Rainy recalls Lark saying that "better is right here" if only people would stay and make it so. This is essentially the novel's thesis, and it's a point Enger makes again and again in the story's last third, all the way up to an ending that will strike some as too tidy. More cynical readers may find Enger's pleas against despair as effective as a "Hang In There" poster on a cubicle wall. But he writes with such sincere affection for this setting and these characters that it's hard to begrudge him his sentimentality. After all, if a reader wants detached pessimism, they can find it virtually everywhere else.

This review first ran in the April 17, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.