My eldest daughter saw this book on my bedside table and asked to take it home and read it. So she read Leif Enger’s newest novel before I even opened it. When she brought it back I asked her how it was, and she said, “Well, it’s good, but it’s rather dark.”

Dark indeed. I Cheerfully Refuse is the story of a man, Rainy, who becomes a fugitive, innocent of any crime, but pursued by a villainous lawman in a dystopian world that has traded law and order for despotism and chaos. It was unclear to me whether nuclear war or climate change or something else or a combination of things made the setting, in and around Lake Superior in Michigan and Canada, so degraded and oppressive. However, something happened to the country and then something else to Rainy in particular, and Rainy is caught in a hellish predicament, not of his own making. So he sets sail in a dilapidated old sailboat to escape the bad guys and find the good.

It is a doomed quest, but Rainy doesn’t give up. He meets with people and situations both good and evil in his journey. And (SPOILER ALERT), he does, after much suffering, win through to a semi-hopeful ending. There’s a bit of magical realism and some futuristic dystopian fantasy as the story winds through the islands and shores of Lake Superior. The plot, however, is not the best part of the book. It’s the words. Mr. Enger is a master at manipulating and communicating with words. He verbs a few of the nouns, and nouns some adjectives and verbs, and mixes up the syntax and casually drops in the metaphors and similes just enough to keep a reader on her toes, reading carefully and slowly, and going back to savor and make sure I didn’t miss something along the journey.

Enger in this book writes lovely sentences like these:

“You’re a man who stops and listens. If that’s not the definition of friendship, it’s close enough for now.”

“Words are one way we leave tracks in the world, Sol. Maybe one day you will write a book, like Olaus did, or Molly Thorn. And people will read it, like I’ve been reading to you. And they will know that you were here, and a little about what you were like.”

“. . . our job always and forever was to refuse Apocalypse in all its forms and work cheerfully against it.”

“[I]t began to resemble what I once imagined church might be like, a church you could bear, where people laughed and enjoyed each other and did not care if they were right all the time or if other people were wrong.”

“One shelf became two. Then a wall. Then eight-foot rolling racks from a shut library in Hayward, Wisconsin. Maudie suggested changing the shop name to reflect its inventory. Bread and Books. Loaves and Lit. Pulp and Provender. Lark laughed off the idea. She said all of it was bread.”

So, I Cheerfully Refuse is a good book, but dark. In times of chaos and uncertainty and change, it might be good to read a book about man living through similar (but much worse) times. Or it might not. I enjoyed the book, but your mileage and ability to stay cheerful may vary.

“I am always last to see the beauty I inhabit.”