“I Cheerfully Refuse” is magnificent, plain and simple. It is perhaps Leif Enger's best novel. All the iconic hallmarks of his marvelous writing voice are here in fullest bloom (or should I say flower, you'll get this reference soon enough!!)-his wry humor, the poetry of his sentences, his matchless story-telling skills. Vintage Leif. Downright Engerian, if he finally deserves to become an adjective! In that all great fiction is "relevant", this new book is deeply relevant to our collective future vision of America. “I Cheerfully Refuse” takes place exactly 37 years into the future. I hasten to add that, as Lark once explained to Rainy, this is NOT post-apocalyptic; the word apocalypse originally had nothing to do with nukes or climate but came from a Greek term meaning to UNCOVER. To reveal. What we have here is a post-democratic and anarchic America rife with lunatic creeds, resource scarcity, and Willow, a fast-acting lethal pharmaceutical embraced by those in search of "something better." Even if life radiates bleak, Rainy and his wife Lark are really doing okay. They don't have much-just who does these days?-but it's enough. They have one another. Lark has her rogue bookstore filled to the brim with scorned literature. Rainy has his bass and his ragtag band. They live in an intimate and supportive community in Icebridge, right on the edge of Lake Superior, so vast it's actually referred to as the sea. In classically proportioned fashion, a stranger arrives...a journey begins, a child arrives and the world as they knew it is forever tipped off balance... We must all cheerfully refuse!!! Apart and together and forever and always!
