I Cheerfully Refuse by Leif Enger book review -

T.S. Eliot claimed, “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper.” That whimper is the sound of me being buried under novels about it.

This week I’m recovering from one apocalyptic novel, reviewing a new one, reading a forthcoming one and wearily eyeing two more. Clearly, we’ve arrived at the future in which everyone writes about the collapse of civilization for 15 minutes. If the world is really about to end, I wish it would hurry up.

The strange thing about doomsday, though, is its infinite adaptability. Note, for instance, how graciously the eschatology of previous millennia swelled to accommodate fears of nuclear annihilation in the 20th century. And now climate change, seasoned with a soupçon of political tyranny, promises to cook all our anxieties in a final vat of despondency. The result is a literary doom loop that keeps spinning faster. Over the last few years, I’ve read so many dystopian novels that I had to look up the plural spelling of “apocalypse.”

It’s comforting to imagine that the persistence of this bleak genre is a perverse kind of optimism: Despero, ergo sum! After all, we’ve survived long enough for Sandra Newman to publish a retelling of “1984” called “Julia.” When I first read George Orwell’s terrifying book in the 1970s, I worried we’d never make it to 1984, let alone to the 21st century.

But now that Leif Enger has written an apocalyptic novel, the world may actually be coming to an end. Enger, you’ll remember, launched his career in early September 2001 with a mega-bestseller called “Peace Like a River” — an inspiring adventure about a family that regularly experiences miracles. As the twin towers smoldered, coldblooded critics recoiled at his novel’s unabashed spirituality, but I thought it was divine.

Almost 25 years later, Enger’s idealism is contending with a world even grimmer than the Armageddon envisioned at the end of a Trump-branded Bible. His new novel, titled “I Cheerfully Refuse” (a bit too on the nose), describes a future swamped by climate change, economic disparity and political decay. Sixteen wealthy families — so out of touch that they’re referred to as “astronauts” — own all the “mineral rights and satellite clusters and news factories and prisons and most clean water and such shipping as remained.” How comfortingly familiar!

But other trendlines from our time have reached their inevitable conclusion in the wasteland Enger describes: Pandemics have thinned the population. Indentured servitude is back in vogue, and the government provides “compliance therapeutics” to keep workers docile and obedient. Nitrous oxide has become a common form of self-medication, and that’s the least of it: A drug called Willow, “a rising star in the market of despair,” is ingested by individuals, entire families and sometimes whole neighborhoods to take their own lives.

Naturally, these calamities have been ushered in by a deep suspicion of learning, particularly of literature. Fundamentalists have closed universities, so-called “patriots” have defunded libraries, and what’s left of America has elected the country’s “first proudly illiterate president.” (Second, but who’s counting?)

But for many pages, “I Cheerfully Refuse” treats all this horror as mere background. Our narrator is a classic Enger mensch: an exceedingly sanguine bass player named Rainy who lives near Lake Superior. He’s a large man with a big heart, desperate to love and determined to see the best in everyone. Despite the dismal condition of the world, he’s managed to carve out a happy existence full of good friendship and deep appreciation for simple pleasures in the twilight of civilization. There’s nothing saccharine or insincere about Rainy’s quixotic demeanor, though he sometimes risks sounding like Mister Rogers enjoying an ice cream cone in a hellscape designed by Hieronymus Bosch.

Chief among Rainy’s blessings is his delightful wife, Lark, an iconoclastic woman who runs a bookstore at a time when bookstores regularly receive bomb threats. She has a voice “like a river’s edge where the water turns back on itself, orbits quietly, proceeds downstream in laughter.” Sounds lovely, if a little damp. But anyhow, she’s the one who, during the early days of their courtship, introduced Rainy to the pleasures of reading. In a great blur of romantic enthusiasm, he read everything she recommended. “I banged and barged through dozens and hundreds of books,” he says. “Did I understand it? Not by half, but when it thunders you know your chest is shaking.”

Nobody describes profound joy or “blazing love” with such infectious abandon as Enger, and it’s a pleasure to be back under his influence. Unsurprisingly, Barnes & Noble has just chosen “I Cheerfully Refuse” as its next national book club pick. But be forewarned: Maniacal forces looming in the shadows of this novel will not stay in abeyance for long. About 80 pages into “I Cheerfully Refuse,” a grisly murder shatters Rainy’s equilibrium and veers the novel into much darker territory. This is not out of character for Enger; for all its sprinklings of New Age glitter, “Peace Like a River” revolved around the killing of two thugs. But in this new novel — so initially resilient to bad news — the death that shatters Rainy’s life feels as traumatic as the shooting of Bambi’s mother.

“No doubt,” Rainy says, “you see where this is headed,” which is the funniest line in the book because it’d be easier to predict the trajectories of eight puppies. Even Rainy doesn’t see where this is headed as he flees his home and launches out on Lake Superior in a small antique sailboat. Without knowing exactly why, he’s running from an elderly but implacable fiend who reportedly hasn’t slept in 42 years.

Enger casts this adventure as an Orphean quest, but once Rainy takes on a young sidekick who’s also on the lam, the enterprise feels like “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” reconceived by Cormac McCarthy. Blowing around Lake Superior with a toy compass and an incomplete chart book, Rainy and his elfin companion manage to stay a few miles ahead of their mysterious pursuer in a black cruiser. Periodically, they dock at towns clinging to social order with varying degrees of success, and this travelogue through a ruined world will eventually give way to an even stranger section where Rainy’s good will is challenged in increasingly gruesome ways.

Rainy, so good, so virtuous, so devoted to innocence, is the first to admit that he makes “a shaky protagonist,” but the novel exhibits its own tremors sparked by incongruent tones and disparate storylines. This is a book whose margins strain to corral marital bliss and executions, goofy optimism and torture, natural beauty and pedophilia, bonhomie and lynchings. Indeed, at times “I Cheerfully Refuse” sounds like your ear buds are picking up every other audiobook on the subway — murder mystery, fairy tale, picaresque adventure, dystopian horror and more.

But give in to Enger’s voyage and, as you get your sea legs, you’ll come to understand these apparent incongruities not as a problem of narrative but as a proposition for survival. Rainy has rigorously adopted the philosophy of his wife, who once described herself as “probably doomed and perplexingly merry.” Given the health of the planet, what else can we do but “refuse Apocalypse in all its forms and work cheerfully against it,” because once we stop refusing, it is all over.

In his previous novels, Enger may have whistled past the cemetery, but this time he’s digging deeper and even dancing with the bones. As Rainy sails out into our future, his leaky hull is stocked with Emerson’s old transcendental self-reliance. What sounds like magical thinking is really a tempered sword of existential glee.

Does the world need a sweet apocalyptic novel? Is such a thing even possible? This doomsday in daffodils will surely exasperate some readers, but for others — myself included — it offers an alluring itinerary toward hope.

Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post. He is the book critic for “CBS Sunday Morning.”

I Cheerfully Refuse

By Leif Enger

Grove. 329 pp. $28

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZK%2Bwu8qsZmtoYml8cYCOaWlooV2Ytaax0Z%2BspaSpYr%2BmstSsnGaklZ6zbrHNoJyrZZKkvKx5wqWsm2c%3D