The horizon was dirty and the waves were back to horses. Sometimes a gust knocked one’s mane clean off and scattered it abroad. The wind remembered ice.

You may recall that I’m a big fan of Leif Enger, who not only writes like an angel but is a fellow Minnesotan. So I was happy to see (how did I miss it?) that he had a new novel out – I Cheerfully Refuse.

I’m sorry to say I was disappointed by this book. This wasn’t the sort of thing I looked for from the author of Peace Like a River. However, since it’s beyond dispute that Enger is both smarter than I and a better writer, I may have simply misunderstood him.

I Cheerfully Refuse is a postapocalyptic story – but not the usual kind with zombies or Mad Max societal ferality. The America of this book, about a generation in the future, I guess, is controlled by sinister powers known as the “astronauts,” who dominate business and politics from the east coast. But before that there was apparently a takeover by “hard-shell patriots” who burned books in “fundie bonfires.” Now life goes on in America, but the roads are bad, the electricity sporadic, the air and water polluted, and many communities exercise vigilante law.

Rainy (short for Rainier), our hero and narrator, is a house painter and part-time gig musician (electric bass) in the community of Icebridge (not far from Greenstone, the setting of Enger’s novel, Virgil Wander) on the shore of Lake Superior. His beloved wife (or partner, I wasn’t sure) is Lark, who runs a used book shop. Theirs is a happy life, and they get on well with their neighbors.

Then Kellan arrives. Kellan is a starving wanderer. It’s soon clear that he’s an escapee from one of the “medical ships” where human experimentation is done. Harboring such a fugitive is illegal, but Rainy and Lark take him in. He has something to trade for their hospitality – a rare copy of a book Lark has been searching for all her life.

But the authorities come for them, and before long Rainy’s world has been shattered. He flees in a sailboat, with no plan except a vague idea of returning to the Slate Islands, where he and Lark had a happy interlude years before. But he’s a hunted man now. In time he will acquire a companion, a nine-year-old girl he rescues from an abusive home. But it’s a cold world on the great lake with the law on your trail.

I Cheerfully Refuse is as well-written as you’d expect from an author of Enger’s genius. But his previous books have carried a gentle but pervasive odor of Christianity – sometimes even explicitly Christian. There’s a sort of Christianity here, too, but it’s the sentimental kind – a Rousseauean conception that people are basically good and only do wrong because society is out of skew. That all legal punishment is evil, and everyone should just be forgiven and set free.

I perceived (perhaps I’m paranoid) a political tone here that I’ve never seen in Enger before. As if he’s one of those panicked by the rise of our current president, who believes all the stereotypes about American conservatives, especially religious ones, as cultural troglodytes: “There was a sinuous distrust of text and its defenders.”

I might point out that it is not the conservative schools that are turning out illiterate graduates. It’s not the conservatives who try to purge the classics from curricula. It’s not the conservatives who design ugly, brutalist buildings and tape bananas to walls and call it art.

As I said, maybe I misunderstood. Maybe there’s a rich Christian subtext here that passed over my head. After all, big Pharma is a major villain, and there is a plot line in there arguing against assisted suicide.

All I can say is that I Cheerfully Refuse is a well-written book that disappointed this fan.