In I CHEERFULLY REFUSE, Leif Enger returns to the same territory near his hometown of Duluth, Minnesota, that provided the locale for his last novel, VIRGIL WANDER. Set in an ominous dystopian near future, it’s an affecting story of love, loss and loyalty that’s also a colorful and deeply imagined tale of maritime adventure and survival.

In this unspecified future era, reading is “on the ropes” in a United States where “fundie bonfires” consume books that include everything from LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER to the Harry Potter series, and the country, unsurprisingly, is led by a “proudly illiterate president.” Even though the space program has been abandoned because it had “failed --- decades ago --- to return a profit for investors,” the members of society’s ruling class are known as “astronauts.” That’s “the prevailing idiom for the sixteen or so families who ran coastal economies and owned mineral rights and satellite clusters and news factories and prisons and most clean water and such shipping as remained.”

"Some night, when the wind rattles the shutters and raindrops pelt the windows, curl up with this good-hearted novel and imagine yourself sharing a rickety sailboat with Rainy and Sol. You’ll be guaranteed a rewarding journey."

References to the “anoxic Indian [Ocean] and post-ice Arctic” and the story of a Canadian town that simply slid into Lake Superior one day hint at the scope of the world’s ecological collapse, underscored by bodies of drowning victims randomly popping to the surface of Lake Superior as its vast waters warm. And to add to the terror of a world that in Enger’s portrayal teeters between an uneasy normalcy and chaos is the ready availability and growing popularity of an ingestible product known as “Willow” that offers its users a quick and painless method of socially approved suicide.

The novel’s narrator is Rainy, a bass guitarist in a local band in the small town of Icebridge, Minnesota, on the shore of Lake Superior. He lives with his wife Lark, who runs a used bookstore that serves as a “merry purveyor of rebellion” amid the hostile reading world. “Some still enjoyed resenting the far-flung coasts for their gleam and influence,” Rainy observes, “but I think we all accepted the grace of the overlooked,” with a humility that captures his worldview. When they welcome into their home a young man named Kellan, who may be a “squelette” --- the French word for skeleton given to escapees from a societal forced labor program --- they’re ignorant of the danger to which they’ve exposed themselves.

After Rainy and Lark’s house is ransacked by Kellan’s pursuers and Lark is murdered in the course of that crime, Rainy takes to the dangerous waters of a lake that’s “on par with any water on Earth for flat-out menace” in a modest inherited sailboat named Flower, with barely enough sailing know-how to keep himself afloat. His destination is Ontario’s Slate Islands, a place that he and Lark had visited 15 years earlier and where they believe they may have spotted Molly Thorn, Lark’s favorite poet and author of the eponymous unpublished novel...or perhaps her ghost. Rainy vaguely hopes for a similar encounter with his late wife’s spirit.

Whether Rainy is sailing through a “northerly breeze that smelled of spruce marshes and occasionally of damp smoke” or across “turquoise deeps under black stone cliffs,” Enger’s descriptions of his days and nights on the treacherous lake --- including one of the storm that almost takes his life and his ingenuity in saving himself from drowning --- are both realistic and evocative.

But the novel takes on true emotional weight when Rainy onboards a passenger --- nine-year-old Sol --- whom he rescues from her abusive uncle by trading away his beloved Fender guitar after he discovers she’s stowed away on his boat. In their 14 years of marriage, Rainy and Lark were childless, and as he teaches Sol to read and write and gently tries to heal some of her emotional wounds, he takes on with an easy grace the role of surrogate father to the suspicious girl.

As he’s demonstrated in novels like PEACE LIKE A RIVER, Enger is a consummate storyteller, and he makes sure that Rainy and Sol confront a range of challenges that include random snipers, arsonists and even a larcenous bridge troll, in addition to the considerable perils of the sea. As they navigate the lake, they’re pursued by a sinister character named Werryck, a “walking Armageddon” who reportedly hasn’t slept in 42 years and may be implicated in Lark’s murder. He also commands a prison ship that’s home to a drug manufacturing facility and terrifying medical experiments. Correctly suspecting that Rainy’s sailboat is carrying something of great value, he won’t rest until it’s in his possession.

“Sometimes no right ending can be found,” Rainy observes of his dissatisfaction with the conclusion of DON QUIXOTE, one of Lark’s favorite novels. Fortunately, that’s not a problem for Leif Enger, as he brings this elegiac adventure story to a satisfying close. Some night, when the wind rattles the shutters and raindrops pelt the windows, curl up with this good-hearted novel and imagine yourself sharing a rickety sailboat with Rainy and Sol. You’ll be guaranteed a rewarding journey.