Enger, Leif. I Cheerfully Refuse. Grove Atlantic, New York, 2024. F; 5/24.

This author started out as a journalist I believe and then wrote with a brother under a mutual pseudonym. Here he’s come up with a strongly affecting story and group of characters and a plot that made an unexpected sudden turn that really got my attention and then held it.

Rainier (“Rainey”) is our protagonist, a knock-about resident of a small town on Lake Superior who is a big guy (he beats up other kids in school but only when attacked) and who plays a mean but soothing electric string bass in a band. Author Enger captures us with Rainey’s instinctive understanding and kindness to eccentric neighbours and wanderers in the town, assisted by Rainey’s wife Lark who is one of the sweetest and loveliest female fiction leads I’ve run into in a long time. Everything feels humane but wonderfully real.

However. Alongside it all there is a hinted-at deep political and dystopic creepiness abroad. Without deviating our attention from Rainey and Lark’s joy we sense (it’s only alluded to, never described) an autocratic, captious, powerful, sophisticated aura that feels like it might (has to really) result in something unappealing.

Rainey tells us he needs to look away, and that early plot twist surprised me with a walloping fictional shock that turns Rainey’s world upside down. Rainey takes off on a much more contrasting odyssey full of less cataclysmic but still scary turns of events. Terribly bad weather on Lake Superior in a small boat, pedophile abuse, a Wells’s Time Machine-like moral contrast of two neighbouring towns, captivity and torture, and Kafkaesque administrative unreasonableness, all beating down on our dauntless big guy. But Mr. Enger manages a balance by positive turns and unexpected random acts of kindness as we would say, striking the type of moral and emotional ambivalence I remember in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (although goodness nowhere close to the depth of that monster). Most of the plot involves assorted trouble and Rainey’s endurance, bookended by the joy of his marriage and a final confrontation with the dystopic authorities.

Not to spoil any suspense you might experience reading the novel if you haven’t let’s just say things are settled at the end.

I’m a bit on the fence about the overall effect. Leif Enger can really write and there is a lot of eidetic and nicely-timed imagination in this story. It’s hard not to like Rainey as he just eludes being Superman, preacher, ideologue, magic musician, and other tediousnesses. He’s a credible if lucky everyman. Secondary characters tend to be realistic and unpredictable. And the dystopic side of things although horrifying is mostly held in the background until the end, while the inner and outer lives of characters keep us occupied.

8.4/9.3