As a long-time lover of speculative fiction and dystopias, I’m always on the lookout for novels that peer beyond catastrophe to ask what kind of people we can still become. Leif Enger’s latest, though not hard sci‑fi, ticks that box with a quiet power: a near‑future tale steeped in philosophy, kindness, and refusal.
I Cheerfully Refuse — Leif Enger: Life, Death, Meaning
Published on 23.04.2024, Leif Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse is, at heart, a philosophical meditation on life, death, and the search for meaning. Set in a near‑future America that feels plausibly frayed rather than theatrically ruined, Enger writes with warmth and sly humour about ordinary people navigating extraordinary unravellings. The short description could hardly be truer: this is a thoughtful, humane gaze into the dark.
Enger’s prose has that lantern‑in‑fog quality—tender, lucid, and stubbornly hopeful. Instead of gadgetry and timelines, he gives us music, memory, shoreline towns, and the fragile economies of trust that hold a community together. The world may be wobbling, but the book’s compass points devoutly to compassion, curiosity and craft—how we mend, how we make, how we keep company when the lights flicker.
Life, death, meaning: Enger threads them as a single rope. Death arrives not as spectacle but as consequence, as weather; life is the slow practice of attention; meaning is the quiet art of choosing—what to hold, what to let go, what to refuse. The novel’s moral stance is neither naïve nor nihilist. It’s the steadiness of someone who has seen the worst rumour about the future and decides, nonetheless, to meet it with grace.
A sci‑fi fan’s lens, with a quote and a 🍵🍵 rating
Coming from the sci‑fi and dystopia shelf, I admired how Enger does “near‑future” without the usual chrome. The world‑building is soft focus yet convincing: infrastructure loosens, norms buckle, and human decency is constantly tested. Readers who relish character‑led collapse—more Station Eleven hush than Mad Max roar—will feel right at home.
There’s a line that functions as the book’s spine and ethos: “I cheerfully refuse.” It’s a simple mantra, but it carries a universe—refusal not as rage but as posture; cheerfulness not as denial but as disciplined mercy. As a sci‑fi reader, I loved how that phrase retools the apocalypse: not an end‑of‑days spectacle, but a daily practice of choosing the humane over the easy.
Rating: 🍵🍵🍵🍵 (4/5). I’m docking a single cup for the occasional meander that softens urgency, but I’d drink this brew again for its luminous sentences and moral clarity. Recommended if you like your dystopias tender, your stakes human, and your endings open enough to let the light in.
For those of us who haunt the borderland between speculative futures and aching presents, I Cheerfully Refuse offers a rare, restorative kind of courage. Not escapism, not despair—just a steady, human refusal to surrender our better selves. I closed the book feeling lighter, and a little braver.