Review of THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY by Amor Towles

 4 Stars

Readers expecting another A Gentleman in Moscow will receive a surprise because this book is very different in terms of style.  But just like Towles’ previous book, it is a great read.

The novel covers ten days in June of 1954.  Emmett Watson, 18, arrives home after serving a sentence in a juvenile reformatory.  Since he and his eight-year-old brother Billy are orphans, they decide to leave their Nebraska home and set out for California in Emmett’s 1948 Studebaker to begin a new life.  Before they can leave, two of Emmett’s fellow inmates, Duchess and Woolly, arrive with alternate travel plans.  Instead of heading west, the Watsons have to make a detour to New York City and not always in Emmett’s car. 

The book is narrated from multiple perspectives, most in the third person.  Only Duchess’ chapters and those of Sally, a neighbour of the Watsons, are in first person.  Often the same event is seen from the viewpoint of more than one character.  Characters also reveal their opinions of others; for instance Duchess admires Emmett’s integrity and Woolly is well aware of Duchess’s tendency to exaggerate:  “For when it came to telling stories, Duchess was a bit of a Paul Bunyan, for whom the snow was always ten feet deep, and the river as wide as the sea.”

This structure allows all characters to be fully realized.  Emmett emerges as a decent young man who loves his brother and is determined to make a better life for both of them.  Billy is an endearing child, trusting and precocious but naïve.  Sally is stubborn and independent.  Woolly is kind and has a childlike sense of wonder.  Duchess is a charismatic charmer, described by one man as “one of the most entertaining shit slingers whom I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet,” but he is selfish and manipulative.  Because detailed backstories are provided for everyone, the reader comes to understand characters’ motivations and see that all are flawed.  No one is totally perfect or imperfect.  My one complaint about the characters is that they often seem older than their biological ages. 

Billy is obsessed with a book compiling stories of heroes and adventurers, some real and some mythical.  These stories are referenced often.  What is emphasized is that each of the characters in the novel sets out on a journey with a personal agenda.  Emmett wants to go to Texas but Billy convinces him to go to California because he wants to find someone.  Duchess and Woolly want to go to the summer home of Woolly’s family in the Adirondacks, though their specific reasons for that visit are different.

Billy’s book combines stories “of the greatest minds of the scientific age,” like Galileo, da Vinci and Edison, and legends of “mythical heroes” like Hercules, Theseus, and Jason, to suggest “That shoulder to shoulder they traveled through the realms of the known and the unknown making the most of their intelligence and courage, yes, but also sorcery and enchantment and the occasional intervention of the gods.”  Like legendary travellers and real-life discoverers, Billy and Emmett encounter obstacles, and both dangerous people and people who are genuinely kind.  They are sometimes taken off course.  They both learn lessons along the way.

The point seems to be that life is a journey, but people get to make choices about where they want to go:  “Maybe, just maybe what [God] requires of us, what He expects of us, what He hopes for us is that . . . we will go out into the world and find [our missions] for ourselves.”  Everyone can be a hero or adventurer.  Emmett’s father quotes Emerson to encourage his son to choose his own path “and in so doing discover that which he alone was capable of.”  We can determine our fates:  “For only when you have seen that you are truly forsaken will you embrace the fact that what happens next rests in your hands, and your hands alone.”  This lesson Billy takes to heart.  One elderly man chooses to follow in Ulysses’ footsteps (in both the literal sense and in the sense outlined in Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses”). 

There is something for every reader.  There is suspense when they face life-threatening danger.  There is pathos in the troubled histories of so many of the characters.  There is humour:  “On the shelf above the fish was a recent photo of four men having just finished a round of golf.  Luckily it was in color, so you could take note of all the clothes you would never want to wear.”  I loved the literary allusions:  a Walt Whitman impersonator is described so that “with the floppy hat on his head and his milky blue eyes, he was every bit the song of himself.”

The more I think about the novel, the more I find noteworthy.  A re-reading would not be amiss.  This is magical storytelling.  Though the book has almost 600 pages, it does not feel lengthy in the least.