I Cheerfully Refuse: A Book Review-ish
Lief Enger on hope and longing
*Contains spoilers*
I just finished Leif Enger’s latest (dystopian!!!) novel, I Cheerfully Refuse, and there are three things that will stay with me for a very long time from .1
(Also, yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This is my first post on this publication that I’ve tentatively titled “
”, and I really don’t have time to write anything well-written or comprehensive, but what I do want is to make friends and have old friends join in these conversations with me. That would be the DREAM.)On Hope
I think it’s hard to write about hope well.
Too much of it and the novel is boring. (Sorry not sorry) But it’s true, and honestly, I’d argue that perfect endings are also dystopian 👀) On the other hand, NO hope at all kinda misses the point of dystopian novels, no?
Well-crafted hope in dystopian novels is kinda like that one uncle you know who is 86 and still smokes 5 packs of cigs a day. Against all odds, bro is still breathing.
He. just. wont. die.
You know, when Lark was murdered, I really didn’t know how the novel would continue. If not her to lead the charge with her powerful army of BOOKS, then who?
But then I saw hope somehow arrive again through Rainy’s bass playing. Music—literally just *sounds* —has that knack where it finds the smallest crevices of the heart and gets it going again. Scales become arpeggios become chords become memories become mindsets become behaviors become collectives becomes hope.
And then Rainy decides to trade in his guitar for rights to Sol. I hated that. To lose something so symbolically valuable for a stranger felt like such an unfair sacrifice. Why did Enger decide to strip everything away from Rainy? He’s lost his wife, his bass, and he’s left with a nine-year old child named Sol. Honestly, just kill him already.
The profound lesson here, to me, is that every moment is an opportunity to reimagine how hope might be present.
Over time, Rainy’s relationship with Sol becomes a generative one. Laughter reemerges from the darkness, silly questions are asked, people are reading to one another again. Lark, in brief moments—comes back to life.
Then Rainy loses his boat and gets captured. He’s forced to make music for Werryck, the tormented man that was in charge of murdering his wife. You would think that would exterminate any sense of hope, but it does the opposite. Rainy swells into who he’s always supposed to be while Werryck disintegrates.
Hope shows up as anything— as terrible storms, a stale piece of bread in prison, biological survival, and strategic subservience.
This is the mechanism of hope. It is the sunflower that miraculously grows in the cracks of concrete. A dystopian concrete assumes that smothering and covering hope ensures its death, but hope thrives on being hidden.
As Wendell Berry writes, “under the pavement, the soil is dreaming of grass.” Hope is the imagination and act of breaking through concrete.
On Protection
“It’s taken all my life to learn protection is the promise you can’t make. It sounds absolute, and you mean it and believe it, but that vow is provisional and makeshift and no god ever lived who could keep it half the time.”
This is the line that really stuck out to me. It’s terrifyingly true.
I’ve had some personal instances this past year where a friend would share a very difficult situation they’re experiencing, and I’ve been tempted to say something along the lines of “It’s going to be okay", but I always end up being unable to say these words. I knew that I would either get lucky or be a liar.
You really can’t promise to protect someone, especially for the important things. Yeah, you can tell your friend that you’ll protect them from missing their meeting by calling them 10 minutes beforehand.
But you can’t promise that everything will turn out fine, that life will only have *just enough* suffering to make us resilient and eventually make it into a TedTalk, or that depression will go away, or that they’ll find a person to marry and have kids and achieve the American dream live happily ever after.
You can promise that you’ll try your best to be a good friend, telling someone that you can protect them creates the wrong expectations. There are too many forces inside and outside that are beyond our control.
And despite Rainy saying this quote rather early in the novel, he still feels this sense of responsibility to protect Sol and later her grandpa, Griff. When they are all captured, Rainy’s guilt is indicative that he’s made an internal promise to take care of them, to protect them.
So I think Rainy’s promise to Sol is strange in the sense that he know what he’s doing isn’t possible yet he’s doing it anyways, but reassuring to me because we all do this. We know that the biggest promises are bound to fail, but it’s better than a safe promise that just reinforces our emotional safety.
Is making this promise of protection something we do as humans for those that we care about, and is it involuntary? Is this promise a testament of our love, is it just arrogance, is it a useful fiction, is it playing god, or is it an exercise in how we hope? Is this act of promising someone protection breaking through dystopian concrete and pushing the limits of what we can and ought to do for our loved ones but also ourselves? To become stretched and dream and suddenly it is reality?
I don’t know.
On Environment
The most fascinating and convicting part of this novel to me was that as climate change continued to wreak its havoc on earth, the rising temperature of Lake Superior led to an unsettling phenomenon—dead bodies from the bottom of the lake were floating to the top. Government agencies ordered citizens that would stumble upon these bodies to attach heavy weights so that they would sink back down again.
I heard this from a podcast that at Lake Superior at the bottom is 33F, but human bodies float at like 35F. In other words, we’re closer to seeing death than we realize. It’s only a few degrees away.
This genius touch makes me think about how the costs of our decisions are often hidden.
We don’t ever really consider the amount of exploited labor and damage that is enacted to buy a t-shirt for $5 or a water bottle for $9. These products have literally seen hundreds of hands, are composed from materials that have covered numerous continents, and are built by machines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. What we care about is that it looks cute or participating in a social trend.
BUT The bodies!!! They are hidden and sunk beneath us, but one day, they will rise for a generation that did not cause it, and they will be held responsible.
The depressing part is that some of us do see the exploitations of capitalism on our fellow global citizens and the earth, but in our privilege we shrug our shoulders and just say “ah, what can we do? Amazon is just too convenient for me for me to stop using it.”
We don’t need to live in the dystopia that Enger describes to know that we desperately need to find hope in these spaces.
Did you have thoughts on the novel? Have you read it yet? Can you please read it and comment what struck you?
ok cya,
hdo
First, who would’ve thought that Enger would have written a dystopian novel of all things? I don’t know, but I have a sneaking suspicion that you don’t choose dystopian novel, but dystopian novels choose you.
GORGEOUS