"I Cheerfully Refuse" by Leif Enger

It is sometime in the future, but perhaps not the distant future. Rainey, a bear of man in his 30s, lives with Lark, the woman he adores, in a small town on the Lake Superior coastline. Rainey plays guitar with a local group, while Lark runs a bookstore. They have, if not a comfortable life, a life they enjoy living together. Some people don’t enjoy life at all and have taken something called Willow, billed as a doorway into another life but sounding more like a suicide pill.  

Lark makes an occasional trip to nearby places like Duluth whenever she hears of an estate sale or other availability of books. It’s only used books that are now sold; no one’s publishing new ones. Electricity functions off and on. People try to muddle through as best they can; Willow is becoming a more attractive option. Manufacturing, like for security systems and pharmaceuticals, happens on big ships docked in lakes, rivers, and the ocean. People with no other way to make a living can become indentured servants or volunteer to be test subjects.

 

The coasts, and everything within them, are owned by 16 families, while the interior regions function as best they can. There seems to be some kind of theocracy in the South; parts of the Upper Midwest seems to function under some kind of general, if fraying, agreement. The U.S. dollar still functions; there just doesn’t seem to be much of it around, creating a thriving barter system. To the north, Canada has been affected, too, but seems somewhat better off.

 

Something has happened to the world in I Cheerfully Refuse, the new novel by Leif Enger, but what that something is isn’t exactly defined. Climate change, perhaps. Societal breakdown, for sure. Rainey and Lark don’t hoard, except for coffee beans. Replacing a mechanical part is often a major exercise in search and bartering.

 

Leif Enger

A young man named Kellan stumbles into the life of Rainey and Lark. They suspect he’s a squelette, the term for indentured servants who’ve run away. But he offers Lark an old, advanced reading copy of I Cheerfully Refuse, a book by Mollie Thorn, who lived in the middle of the 20^th century. For Lark, it’s a treasure, personally more meaningful than any other book. On a sailing trip, years before, Lark and Rainey met Mollie Thorn, or perhaps her ghost, in the Slate Islands off the coast of Canada. 

 

Kellan suddenly disappears, but they don’t think much of it. Rainey is playing a gig in the local pub when he sees officers come inside, and they’re looking for him. He rushes out the back door, arriving home to find his house torn apart, And worse. He flees to the only refuge he knows – their sailboat Flower and the safety of the lake. Trying to understand what happened, he sets sail for the Slates, hoping to find Lark there, much like they found Millie Thorn.

 

It's an extraordinary story, simultaneously fictional and dystopian yet so close to contemporary reality that it’s eerie. And perhaps a bit frightening,

 

Enger is the author the three previous novels, including the widely acclaimed Peace Like a River; So Young, Brave and Handsome; and Virgil Wander. A native of Minnesota, all three of his novels have received awards and national recognitions. He lives with his family in Duluth. 

 

I Cheerfully Refuse is a novel about books and the love for them, about the things that bind us together and tear us apart, about the choices we make, and about the love we share and should always cherish. And it’s the story of a man who will brave adversity and danger and still hold on to love.  

 

Related:

 

Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River. 

 

Leif Enger’s So Brave, Young and Handsome. 

 

Some Monday Readings

 

“Spring and All,” poem by William Carlos Williams – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

W.S. Gilbert – Alexander Larman at The Critic Magazine. 

 

The Prophets: Eric Hoffer – Rob Henderson at The Free Press.

 

Why Does Being Left-Wing Make You Unhappy? – Ian Leslie at The Ruffian. 

 

What options does Israel have? – Douglas Murray at The Spectator.

 

Leif Enger's "So Brave, Young and Handsome"

Leif Enger’s first novel, Peace Like a River, puzzled me. I couldn’t decide what it was – a western, a contemporary version of Huckleberry Finn, or an exploration of good and evil and how sometimes “good people do evil things,” Or maybe all of these things and something else, too, something out there just beyond my grasp.

I wish I had read Enger’s second novel, So Brave, Young and Handsome, first. I understood the first one better after reading the second, and I liked the second one better, in fact, which surprised me for some reason. The first novel even has a cameo role in the second novel, and that was my tip-off.

Both are novels about the nature of story and storytelling. They’re all of those other things, too, but they are essentially about story and storytelling.

Long ago and in a galaxy far, far away, I took a course called “The Nature of Story” for a masters program. We read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which most of the class found rather odd if not bizarre but which for me seemed like growing up in New Orleans. We read Twain’s Roughing It, Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, Nabokov’s Pale Fire and a lot of works that are, consciously or unconsciously, about story and storytelling. Enger’s two novels, although published considerably later, would have fit perfectly into the syllabus.

So Brave, Young and Handsome is a story told by Monte Beckham, who’s had a spectacular success with his first novel, a western, but fails to write anything that might work as a second novel. Glendon Hale comes rowing down the river by Monte’s house, and life will change forever for Monte and his family. Monte accompanies Glendon on a trip to Mexico to find Blue, Glendon’s first and possibly only love. Early into the trip, Monte learns that Glendon is an outlaw, and the authorities are still looking for him. It’s 1915, far enough away from the Wild West but still close enough for outlaws to be hanging around.

So Enger takes us on a road trip, and gives us a western, a novel about the odd interchange of good and evil (and heroes and villains), a love story, a history lesson or two, and considerable, if subtle, discussion about stories. Because that’s what the characters are actually talking about. Stories.

While So Brave, Young and Handsome is not a sequel, seeing Enger’s first novel through the prism of his second helps explain both.

And the man is a storyteller.

"Peace Like a River" Update

I've been mulling over Leif Enger's Peace Like a River for off and on for hours today. Finishing a novel like this one, if there is another one like this one, is like coming to the end of a race but you want to keep on running. So what is this? A simple story with lyrical writing? Deconstructed western? Coming-of-age novel? Postmodernist interpretation of a western?

I want to accept it for what it appears to be on the surface -- a well-told, beautifully written coming-of-age novel that is ultimately about faith. But Peace Like a River won't let you do that. There are too many other things -- hints, wisps of something or another, shadows darting at the corner of your eye -- that suggest something else is going on here. At times, it almost seems that the author himself is barely maintaining control, much like the main character, 11-year-old Reuben Land, barely keeps breathing during asthma attacks.

In some ways, it's also a meta-western -- a western novel about western novels. But that explanation alone isn't sufficient. The closest I'll be able to come to the answer I'm searching for is that I think the novel started out as one thing and became something else. That's not a bad thing. But Peace Like a River isn't giving me much peace right now.

Leif Enger's "Peace Like a River"

I read James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer in January of 1988. I remember the date, more than 21 years later, because I was doing the 2 a.m. feedings with the one-month-old while reading the book for a class. Baby in the left arm, bottle held by left hand; book in the right hand; toothpicks trying to hold the eyes open.

The class was called "The West in the American Imagination," and it was my final course in a master's program. The idea of the course was to study how the West (the American West, not Western civilization) and the idea of the West had been viewed and developed in the 19th and 20th centuries. The Cooper book was the first in the syllabus, and would be followed by Owen Wister, Mark Twain and even Norman Mailer, among many others (lots of reading that semester). Not coincidentally, the St. Louis Art Museum had a major exhibit of Frederic Remington's sculptures and paintings -- the exhibit had inspired the creation of the course.

Highlight of the course for me was Twain's Roughing It, the humorous account of life in the Nevada Territory in the 1860s. Lowlight was the subject of my paper for the course -- The Journals of Zebulon M. Pike, of Pike's Peak fame. The journals seemed to be mostly about Pike being surprised at how cold it gets in winter in Minnesota and being captured as a spy by the Spanish in Colorado and taken back to Mexico before he did any real spying.

All of this came back to me in sharp detail while reading Leif Enger's Peace Like a River. Published in 2000, the novel received a lot of well-deserved acclaim and best-seller status. It's the story of the Land family, and especially Reuben Land, the 11-year-old asthmatic middle child and the story narrator. It's 1962-63 in western Minnesota, and the oldest child, 16-year-old Davy, has killed two bullies who'd been tormenting the family. And killed them in what turns out to be a planned, calculated way. He goes on trial, but before a verdict can be rendered, Davy escapes from jail. The family -- the father, Jeremiah, Reuben, and the 9-year-old daughter, Swede, eventually go after him.

Jeremiah ultimately becomes the counterpoint to his son Davy. Jeremiah Land is something of a prophet, like his biblical namesake. He labors in prayer over his King James Bible. He performs occasional miracles, like willing life into a dead Reuben at birth and, once, walking on air. Jeremiah will wrestle with God about Davy's fate, and God will win.

It's a coming-of-age story, but it took me a while to realize that Peace Like a River aims for something more than that. My clue was Davy's affectionate name for Reuben -- Natty Bumppo, yep, the main character in The Deerslayer.

That's what set me to reading the book more closely and see that Enger had produced not only a coming-of-age story, but also a western, and a commentary on westerns. Nine-year-old Swede is even a writer of western stories and poems (and they're mightily impressive for the work of a 9-year-old, even for 1962). A large part of the story is set in the North Dakota Badlands, where all the old outlaws hung out at one time or another. And there's enough discussion about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid that even I could see some rather obvious parallels to Davy and the people he ends up hiding with.

So this novel leaves me with something of a dilemma. Is it a good story, or is it something of a postmodern deconstruction of the western? Or is it both? Or something else entirely? My conclusion is that I don't know, but the fact I still have these questions makes me wonder if it ultimately succeeds at any of these things, or if I'm just not smart enough to figure it out. I'll think about it some more and post an update soon

But this I do know: had Peace Like a River been written in the 1980s, it would have definitely been included in my course syllabus; postmodernism already reigned supreme in my university's English Department. And I would have had something more interesting to write about for my paper than Zebulon Pike's winter temperature readings at the headwaters of the Mississippi River.

"Peace Like A River"

I'm reading Leif Enger's Peace Like a River. It is part coming-of-age story, part western -- and all glorious novel. It deserves all the acclaim it's received since it was published in 2000.

It's 1962 in rural Minnesota. Reuben Land, an 11-year-old who's asthmatic, tells the story of his family, his father and two other siblings, who sometime before were abandoned by their mother. The oldest, Davy, 16, kills two local bullies who've been terrorizing the family. He goes on trial, but before it ends, Davy escapes from jail. And the family goes after him.

The writing is achingly beautiful, so beautiful, in fact, that I'm deliberately reading slowly, to savor the language and how Enger has constructed his story. The characterizations, the descriptions of the setting and even the expressions the characters use are incredibly well done. And Enger even weaves in a few miraculous elements of magic realism. I'm going to hate to see the story end.

An author friend of mine told me he wishes he had written it. It's easy to understand why.