I Cheerfully Refuse, by Leif Enger, is a book that caught my eye with its evocative and surreal cover. The blurb on the back makes the book sound transportive, a story about a musician on a rainy lake looking for the meaning of life. Set in a not-too-distant America, I Cheerfully Refuse is a strange dystopian story. I don’t usually go in for dystopian fiction, but Enger has set the time for this tale just around the corner, and it paints a vivid picture that I couldn’t look away from.
This dystopian future doesn’t look like most I have read. People aren’t living in caves or vaults. The Earth wasn’t destroyed by nuclear war. We haven’t regressed back to cavemen. Things are just… shittier, across the board. Infrastructure has basically crumbled to the point where the internet, phone, and satellite are only used by a privileged few. But, you can still get more commodities, it just takes a lot longer as trade has been reduced to a glacial pace even if manufacturing is still possible. Medicine, engineering, and science are still going relatively strong, but almost all trades need to be localized with redundancy because most towns and cities can only reach the next town over if they need something. It is unclear what the government is or if it is functional, but people still go about their lives as best they can.
Against this strange but familiar backdrop, we have Rainy, a tall, strong, and brooding protagonist who plays the base and is just trying to get by. He lives with his bookseller girlfriend on the coast of Lake Superior and tries to take each day one at a time. When the powerful elite invade Rainy’s town looking for something and it results in the death of the girlfriend, he takes to the lake on a sailboat he has been restoring to see what else the world might have to offer. Thus begins a powerful tale of reflection and introspection.
I Cheerfully Refuse is a beautifully written book with some excellent messaging that doesn’t actually have a ton going on plot-wise under the hood. If you are looking for an exciting adventure where a lot of things happen, this is not going to be your champion. If you are looking for a moody piece about the nature of man and an eyes-wide-open view of what our world might look like in 50 years, then this book is one of a kind. The prose is wonderful, with most passages reading like poetry that conveys a deep love of people, Lake Superior, and life. Despite the setting feeling just an overall degraded version of our current reality it was easy to imagine finding love and happiness in this world despite all the problems. Enger can easily write about nothing and compel you to sit and listen.
The main personal problem I have with I Cheerfully Refuse is that despite its gripping atmosphere and my sky-high investment, the story never feels like it goes anywhere for me. We pick up a few plotlines throughout the book, but they come and go with little fanfare or impact. The finale in particular felt very empty to me, and I left the book wondering if the entire point was simply to paint some beautiful settings. Yet, if that was the case why open the door to a brilliant and unexplored future for humanity and then do nothing with it? What are Enger’s thoughts on the plan forward other than “love will always persist”? Sure, that’s a nice message and I am sure there is more that I simply missed going on under the surface. At the same time, the book didn’t inspire me to look more closely and dig for additional meaning. It felt like it ran out of steam and left me wondering what the point of its gorgeous narrative was.
Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse is beautiful at its core, but I wish it had a little more presence and a little less ephemerality. I enjoyed my time with the book but I would only recommend it to a very specific kind of reader and I would be unsurprised to hear that others didn’t like it at all. If nothing else, it has the most interesting dystopia I have read in a long time, and Enger has a powerful imagination and poetic prose that makes any story feel like stepping up to a beautiful painting.
Rating: I Cheerfully Refuse – 6.5/10
-Andrew
An ARC of this book was provided to me by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The thoughts on this book are my own.
