Leif Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse is a rare kind of novel—lyrical without pretense, mournful without despair, and quietly defiant in its hope. Set in a fractured, not-so-distant America, the story follows Rainy, a grieving musician adrift on the great inland sea of Lake Superior. His boat becomes his world, his grief the wind behind him, and the sentient lake his only constant companion as he sets out in search of his departed wife—a bookseller whose absence is felt in every line of this elegiac journey.
Rainy narrates with uncommon heart. His voice, simple yet sonorous, carries the narrative like a tide, steady and unforced. He is no hero in the traditional sense—he neither slays dragons nor seeks glory—but there is something quietly radical in his refusal to surrender to the world’s unraveling. The act of setting sail, of seeking something not clearly defined, becomes a gesture of faith. In a country where literacy has nearly vanished, where culture is a rumor and compassion a risk, Rainy becomes an unlikely witness to what remains.
Enger’s America has hollowed out. Cities crumble, infrastructure decays, and a distant billionaire class lords over what’s left with impunity. On land, people are desperate, afraid, and often mute. Yet Rainy’s encounters are not uniformly bleak. He meets strangers who offer warmth without calculation, who open their doors simply because they can. These moments, rendered with gentle precision, feel almost miraculous—not because they are grand, but because they are offered freely in a world that has forgotten how.
Humor pulses beneath the novel’s sorrow like a steady undertow. Rainy’s observations are tinged with absurdity, often dry, occasionally playful. His grief doesn’t make him solemn; it makes him more alive to irony, to beauty, to the way small things—an unexpected smile, a remembered tune—can lift a person. And when a young girl unexpectedly joins him on his voyage, their quiet companionship becomes the emotional anchor of the novel. It is a relationship not of rescue, but of recognition.
Enger’s prose is unhurried and exacting. There’s a quiet music to the way he describes fog lifting from the lake, the soft slap of water against wood, and the silence of two people watching the horizon. Nothing is wasted. He writes like someone who knows the weight of words and trusts their resonance. He allows for stillness, for the emotion that builds in spaces where nothing is said. Even the surreal—the lake’s awareness, the rising of the dead—feels earned, grounded in the novel’s emotional truth rather than its plot.
The story resists resolution. Rainy doesn’t arrive at a final understanding, nor does the world around him transform. What changes is his relationship to longing. The love he carries—grief-worn but intact—no longer paralyzes him; it moves through him like a current. It guides his choices, his speech, and his silences. He doesn’t recover what was lost. He learns to live in its absence without turning bitter. This, too, is resistance.
Enger crafts a world where beauty persists not in defiance of ruin, but within it. The kindnesses exchanged, the trust offered with no assurance of return—these are not acts of sentiment but survival. The novel becomes a kind of hymn, not to what has been destroyed, but to what still flickers in the margins: dignity, tenderness, and wonder.
In the end, I Cheerfully Refuse is more than a narrative. It is a quiet declaration, a whispered anthem against despair. Rainy’s journey is not heroic in the traditional sense, but in a time when apathy feels inevitable, his guileless decency and attention to the world become their form of rebellion. To cheerfully refuse is not to deny the darkness—it is to move forward anyway, with music in your pocket, a story on your lips, and the belief that even in a broken world, something good might still be found.
About the Author
Leif Enger is the author of the bestselling novels Peace Like a River, So Brave, Young, and Handsome, and Virgil Wander. His books have won the Booksense Award for Fiction, the High Plains Book Award for Fiction, and been longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, among other honors. He lives with his wife in Duluth, MN.
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