For an author who has lived in Minnesota his entire life, Leif Enger takes a keen interest in stories of exile. He made a splash with his debut novel, Peace Like a River (2001), which sold over one million copies. The story follows a miracle-working janitor and two of his young children (one beset with asthma) fleeing the law and pursuing his oldest son. His next novel, So Brave, Young, and Handsome (2008), traces the journey of Monte Becket, whose desire for absolution leads him away from home in the hopes he can return a new man. And Virgil Wander (2018) tells the story of a man exiled from his own mind after experiencing a car crash and witnessing the return of a prodigal. All these novels circle around themes of exile, guilt, journeying, and the desire and difficulty of being at home. Enger’s most recent novel, I Cheerfully Refuse (2024), tells the same tale, with a post-apocalyptic twist.

Set in a not-too-distant future, with a geopolitical context assumed and alluded to but never explained, the book’s post-apocalyptic world is eerily believable. “Astronauts” (one thinks of Elon Musk) live far away from ordinary people who are subject to the vagaries of a collapsed society following a plague. Society has regressed to a sort of Wild West libertarianism, which admittedly has its charms. But dark omens lurk: old bodies once preserved in the cool water of Lake Superior float to the surface due to the rising temperatures of climate change. The Willow drug appears, “a rising star on the market of despair,” claiming lives to suicide.

When his contented life with his charming bookselling wife, Lark, is disturbed by an act of inexplicable violence, the protagonist, Rainy, finds himself adrift on Lake Superior, running from the barbaric and mysterious Werryck. In many ways, reading this book felt like living through the last few years: unlikely and distressing things kept happening in confusing succession, which seem to be, as Shakespeare would put it, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The book is darker than Enger’s previous novels, the plot less clear and cohesive, the resolution less clean. And yet in this meandering moral messiness there is something valuable. While Rainy does not possess a refined or intellectual moral compass, he is guided through this listless world by an indomitable impulse to protect the vulnerable from the bullies. This humane habit preserves him from despair, providing something of a model for what it might look like to live well in the morally ambiguous times in which we find ourselves; what the day calls for are not pristine moral philosophers but persons who do not abandon their own or others’ humanity.

Readers will find a murkier world than they may be used to in Enger’s novels, but this only matches the troubled world in which we find ourselves. And, like Rainy, they may also learn to cheerfully refuse to resign themselves to the despair of the contemporary world.