by Leif Enger ★★★★☆
Leif Enger sprung onto the writing scene back in 2001 with his novel Peace Like a River, which Amazon named their Best Book of the Year. With that high praise, I eagerly read it, and mostly enjoyed it, but finished feeling like it was overhyped. I appreciated the writing -- Enger has a clear talent and a wholesome lyricism to his prose -- but I felt slightly disappointed with the novel given my sky-high expectations due to the heaps of praise that had been bestowed upon it.
While Enger has published three other novels since 2001, I Cheerfully Refuse is my first return to his writing. I've long since forgotten the details of Peace Like A River, but early on I started to remember some of his writing talent, and his ability to build authenticity into his characters. The novel takes place at a point in the not-so-distant future; society has mostly crumbled, and people are primarily self-governing. Our main character and narrator is a man named Rainy, who lives with his wife Lark in northern Michigan. They live a modest life, with Lark selling books out of an old coffee shop and Rainy making a few bucks on the side playing bass guitar in the local band.
Resources are limited, mostly by choice; as Rainy says, "Lark and I had media once -- internet, TV, the vivid world delivered secondhand, ready always to predict our moods and sell us better ones -- but we were early abandoners." Lark's love of books and reading was the foundation of their early relationship -- prior to the bookstore, she was a librarian -- but society has also started to frown on reading. "By this time of course reading was itself slipping into shadow. There was a sinuous mistrust of text and its defenders. The country had recently elected its first proudly illiterate president, A MAN UNSPOILT as he constantly bellowed, and this chimp was wildly popular everywhere he went." Lark's bookstore is more an act of rebellion given that climate, but it's the thing that brings her the most joy, scavenging old texts from estate sales and other sources to share with the minority of people who still appreciate the written word.
The pair supplement their income by occasionally taking on a boarder, and when a lone man named Kellan with a ruined hand appears on their doorstep, they rent him their attic room. "Up he went, suitcase in hand, dragging his shadow like chains." After an initial mistrust, Rainy becomes fond of Kellan, seeing him as a kid brother. But before long, Kellan disappears, and trouble soon follows.
That trouble forces Rainy on a quixotic odyssey. Chased from his home, confined to his sailboat, and pursued by indefatigable people for reasons he can't comprehend, he must make his way through ever-darker sections of a crumbling society. There is a realness to Enger's writing, a wholesomeness, an honesty, and those characteristics are all things I associate with an underlying brightness. But this is not a bright book; it's a dark referendum on humanity and society as a whole. When the world starts to crumble, what is the true nature of humanity? For Enger, it's far more ugly than not.
That is not to say the novel is without some joy amidst the sadness. Rainy's relationship with Lark feels wholly authentic and lovingly rendered. While many of those Rainy encounters on his journey are quite horrible, he does encounter kindness along the way, giving some small hope that there is still goodness in a mostly bad world. In general, though, the darkness consumes most of the book's light, and the happiest part of the book is the central adverb in the title.
It's undeniably well-written, but I also found it deflating. It feels like a book that is destined to be read and dissected in high school classrooms, and I'm sure there are dozens of buried pieces of information or allusions to other works outside of the obvious that I missed. It is reminiscent at times of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, with bits of The Odyssey and Don Quixote mixed in. I was expecting -- wrongly, I suppose -- that based on its title this would be a story of rebellion, or an uplifting struggle against a minority of people who were attempting to bring down society, where our protagonist refuses to give in to the darkness. Instead, this feels like a book written during the pandemic at a time when the author was evaluating his fellow man, and that evaluation was too often coming up short. A worthwhile read, and a book whose craft I can appreciate, but not one that I especially enjoyed given its dark nature.
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