Leif Enger blew away booksellers, readers, and critics in 2001 with his debut novel, Peace Like a River. Enger’s fourth novel, I Cheerfully Refuse (Grove, Apr.), is about a man’s odyssey through a dystopian Great Lakes region. PW spoke with Enger about the darkness of his tale, Lake Superior’s awesome power, and how booksellers and authors save lives.
What in your life, or in your world, prompted you to write such a dark novel?
I started making notes for this story when the phrase “alternative facts” showed up, because that was such a clear statement of intent to devalue truth, to exalt ignorance over knowledge and fear over curiosity. How might the world look if we kept to that path? Then the pandemic arrived, and instead of uniting us it intensified our differences. It felt strange to write this urgent novel while desperately hoping events would make it irrelevant, but here we are. It’s 2024, and the urgency has only increased.
Like Station Eleven, I Cheerfully Refuse is set in the Great Lakes region. Why did you set it there and why did you mix up real places like Duluth with fictional places that clearly are based upon real places, like Icebridge?
The mix of real locations with imagined ones is meant to place the story geographically while not appearing to make predictions about specific small communities. The lake itself takes center stage. Superior has a misty world’s-edge intensity. The Ojibwe credited its moody violence to a powerful panther-like entity that lived underwater; Longfellow described a sturgeon so large it swallowed Hiawatha along with his canoe. It’s a fact that hundreds of shipwrecks lie on the bottom, thousands of dead who crowd into your mind in bad weather. If you are speculating about the future it helps to set your story where anything at all might happen, and that’s how Superior feels.
This novel is a love letter to booksellers, and it pays homage to books, language, literacy, and music. Why is a pivotal character, Lark, a bookseller, and why do you emphasize the importance of the written word?
When Rainy is drawn to Lark, he falls first for the sound of her voice, her care, as she recommends books to patrons. It’s only to impress her that he begins to read, and then to his surprise he falls in love with the books themselves. He’s ravished by literature, gets fully lost in it, neglecting his work to read Beowulf, whose tale sweeps him up entirely. This portal into the imagination transforms Rainy’s life. It enlarges his sense of other people, and of what is possible. That’s the power of good books. That’s what’s lost when they’re banned and burned, and that’s why Lark is the presiding spirit of this novel.
It’s intriguing that the novel’s title is a book written by somebody who looms large in the story, but whom we may or may not ever encounter. What was your thinking in placing Molly Thorn and her memoir, I Cheerfully Refuse, at the heart of this novel?
Molly Thorn’s “lost memoir” is central for its buoyancy, for its premise that our banquet of anxieties—climate change, economic collapse, the ugly twins of religious zealotry and looming authoritarianism—makes it our duty to refuse all that. To reject willful ignorance and pursue knowledge; to defy dictators and laugh at theocrats; to embrace curiosity, kindness, coherency, and the hard work of actual stewardship. The title suggests our most effective defiance is the cheerful kind, and that a forward-looking spirit maintains a landing place for the ideas we need most.
What is the primary thing you want booksellers, and readers, to take away from I Cheerfully Refuse?
I always write the book I need at the time. In this case, a tale about people finding reasons for hope and even joy in a world where it seems the lights are going out. To return to your first question, yes, it’s a dark story, but the glimmers of brightness are authentic and hard-earned, and as true as I could write them. I hope readers will connect to that.
