REVIEW: I Cheerfully Refuse . . . to Give Up Hope

Hope wins

I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger. Grove Press, 2024. 336 pp., $19.99

Stronger than the brutalizing gusts on Lake Superior are the winds of hope in Leif Enger’s newest novel, I Cheerfully Refuse. 

Perhaps no line in the book better summarizes the doom alongside the stubborn hopefulness embodied by the story’s main character, Rainy, than a comment from his book-loving wife, Lark, who is trying to open her own bookshop. After Lark makes her first purchase of books for the shop, Rainy asks her how she’s feeling about the endeavor. She replies, “probably doomed and perplexingly merry.”

Nearly everyone in this novel is “probably doomed.” It is difficult to capture in a review the many twists and turns through which Enger takes his readers. While the primary theme is one of hope and optimism, the road meanders through a dystopian near-future landscape populated by “astronauts” and corpses.

The plight of I Cheerfully Refuse does not involve an asteroid that threatens life on earth, or a malicious disease that diminishes the population, or any kind of “act of God” that brings the end near. Rather, the quasi-dystopian setting is a believable situation humans have brought upon themselves. 

In fact, the book begins with a comet—Tashi—that is not going to hit the earth. If Enger wanted one of those kinds of apocalyptic narratives, he had the tools present as early as the second page. While the astronomic catastrophe is averted, readers are greeted with an ominous foretaste: “These comets never bring luck to a living soul, that’s all I know.”

These words of doom play out over the next three-hundred pages. Society has collapsed as sixteen mega-wealthy families, dubbed “astronauts,” own nearly everything; a new drug has convinced droves of citizens that suicide is the best route to “go in search of better”; and reading has been so marginalized that the country has proudly elected its first “illiterate president.” 

It is in this setting that we are introduced to Rainy and Lark, the protagonists. The couple meet in the local library where Rainy first finds a warm place to eat his lunch. As he overhears the librarian give reading suggestions to patrons with care, he falls in love first with her voice and eventually begins to pick up the books she recommends to others. It is fitting for Rainy and Lark’s relationship to start through words: Lark becomes not only Rainy’s wife but his doorway into the world of books and the love of reading.

Books bring Lark into Rainy’s life, and books also bring another significant individual into the protagonists’ circle—Kellan. Shrouded in mystery and mischief, Kellan boards in Lark and Rainy’s home. He brings with him an unpublished manuscript, I Cheerfully Refuse, by Lark’s favorite author, Molly Thorn. The manuscript becomes the link between the unimpressive but stable life that Lark and Rainy have built for themselves and the world of pain that will come their way.

Not only does Kellan bring with him the book Lark has been searching for “since she was twelve” but unbeknownst to his hosts, he also brings with him thousands of stolen doses of a new suicide drug, “Willow.” A life-threatening manhunt is on his heels, led by a man named Werryck. 

Werryck’s character in the unfolding narrative is fantastical. It is rumored he has not slept in seventeen (or maybe forty-two) years. Having outgrown the need for rest, he is unnervingly calm and heartlessly ruthless. His introduction comes with an ominous warning: “He never comes in the door you expect. There is no preparing for Werryck . . . there’s no spotting him early. You think he won’t come but he will. You’re strong and big? Doesn’t matter. Listen to me. When you see him standing in your kitchen, you slip out the back. Be quiet, be quick. Don’t hunt for your wallet. Don’t grab a coat. Go out the window if you have to.”

Werryck’s presence in the story leads to the closing of Lark’s. Having lost Lark and all that is most important to him, Rainy is forced to spend the rest of the story in a dilapidated sailboat, running for his life on Lake Superior. Still, moving from port to port, making friends and enemies along the way, Rainy refuses to give up his wife’s ideas of the good and beautiful. He gains an unexpected father role to his partner on the lam—an orphaned girl named Sol—until, at the end, they both end up face-to-face with the “godlike” Werryck aboard his mysterious medicine ship. 

There is a scene towards the beginning of the novel whose significance the readers cannot understand until much later. As the book opens, Labrino, Rainy and Lark’s friend, shows up with his unfettered pessimism in hand. He is “lonely and kind and occasionally rude by accident, but above all things he was a worried man.” Labrino arrives at Rainy’s house filled with illogical worry over what will befall them because of the Tashi Comet. 

But instead of correcting him in words, Rainy does something that marks his character throughout the story—he turns to his bass guitar: “I opened my mouth, then remembered a few things about my friend. He had a grown son living in a tent on top of a landfill in Seattle. A daughter he’d not heard from in two years. His wife had enough of him long ago, and he was blind in one eye from when he tried to help a man crouched by the road and got beaten unconscious for his trouble.”

And so Rainy simply asks, “Is there anything you’d like to hear, Jack?” It works: “I fetched my bass, a five-string Fender Jazz, and my tiny cube of a practice amp. Labrino was calmed by deep tones.” While Enger never comes out and says it, I am convinced that Rainy’s commitment to the soothing power and beauty of the “deep tones” is key to understanding not only Rainy himself but the larger story.

In an interview with Miwa Messer on the Barnes & Noble book podcast Poured Over, Enger says, “There are mythologies in which the world is created countless eons ago by deep bass tones and some used to say it is the music of the spheres. And Rainy, he has not run into all those ideas, but he senses it, and he understands at some level that is true.”

Even as Rainy and Sol run into the worst of fates later—captured and held prisoner by Werryck on his medicine ship—the importance of beauty and the deep tones remains. Every night, the “godlike” Werryck calls Rainy to his private quarter to play music. 

It is here that readers see a major distinction between the protagonist and antagonist, Rainy and Werryck. Rainy is in tune with something deeper and more profound than his immediate circumstances: beauty. Whether it is innate or something he caught from Lark, Rainy has the “deep tones” running through him. His commitment to the beautiful, the true, and the good keeps him going amidst his worst plights.

On the other hand, Werryck’s commitments lay squarely with pragmatism and power. Maybe no line of Werryck’s more clearly reveals his detachment from beauty and goodness than when Rainy speaks up on behalf of other prisoners whom Werryck is torturing. Werryck argues to Rainy that punishing his subjects is just, as they have broken their contracts. Rainy responds, “the paperwork is in your favor, but I’m appealing to your humanity.” Werryck’s response sounds like something straight from C.S. Lewis’s N.I.C.E, for readers familiar with That Hideous Strength: “You use that word ‘humanity’ as though it represents your favorite set of virtues. It doesn’t and it never did.” 

Faced with evil and a multitude of reasons for despair—embodied by Werryck, the “astronauts,” and those aboard the medicine ship—Rainy continues to move toward the good while producing beauty amongst chaos. Yet the story does not bring optimism center stage in a way that is too on-the-nose or cheesy. Rather, Enger gives us a story with despair, loss, and pain—but a story in which suffering will not have the final word. 

Today’s cultural happenings may have us resonating with the cast of I Cheerfully Refuse: We too are “probably doomed.” And yet, may we, like Rainy and Sol, know the power of the good, the true, the beautiful. May we too have ears to hear the “deep bass tones,” that we may cheerfully refuse to give up hope.

Ronni Kurtz (PhD, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary) is an assistant professor of Theology at Cedarville University. He is the author of several books, including Fruitful Theology: How the Life of the Mind Leads to the Life of the Soul and Light Unapproachable: Divine Incomprehensibility and the Task of Theology.