No surrender

Leif Enger's I Cheerfully Refuse (2024) is a stranger-comes to-town-story that turns suddenly into a hero-takes-a-journey story. It is a happy, contented love story that turns suddenly into a thriller. Those who open the novel expecting another Peace Like a River, Enger's previous best-seller, will find something very different.

Rainy and his wife Lark live a peaceful life on the shores of Lake Superior during an unpeaceful time. Civilization crumbles around them, but they manage, he as a part-time musician, she as a part-time book seller. They take in a young boarder, Kellan, who partly pays with a book, also called I Cheerfully Refuse, that Lark had been looking for.

Soon a mysterious older man, Werryck,  shows up in the community, Kellan disappears and Rainy finds Lark brutally murdered. Believing he might see Lark again, or her spirit, on an island on the other side of the lake, Rainy sails off in his small sailboat, pursued by Werryck in a large ship. Kellan, it turns out, is an escapee from that ship.

Bodies floating in Lake Superior, as well as the sudden popularity of a suicide drug called Willow, give testimony to society's decay, as does Rainy's strange difficulties with people he meets on his journey. Yet along the way he rescues Sol, a nine-year-old girl who has never been to school, and in the end she rescues him from a life of despondency and defeat.

Enger gives us a surprising story about how life can still offer something worthwhile if we cheerfully refuse to surrender.