The Lincoln Highway Another Fine Amor Towles Novel

 

 

THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY (2021)

By Amor Towles

Viking, 576 pages.

★★★★

 

 

The Lincoln Highway traverses through the town in which I grew up. Plus, Amor Towles’ last book A Gentlemen in Moscow is my favorite novel of the 21^st century. You0214 could say I was psyched to read this one.

 

At first, I was mildly disappointed, but The Lincoln Highway grew on me with every page. If you don’t know, the Lincoln Highway runs from Times Square to Lincoln Park in San Francisco, and is generally regarded as the nation’s first transcontinental auto route. Towles’ tale isn’t about the highway per se, but it is about a helter-skelter road trip. Its principal character is Emmett Watson, who was sent to reform school for accidentally killing a bully in a fight. We meet him in 1954, the year he turned 18 and maxed out. Though he is person of few words, he can’t wait to get home to Nebraska to see his kid brother Billy, though he knows he’ll probably have to leave the Cornhusker State because of the bad blood he left behind. Leaving isn’t really a problem as his mother ran away, his father is dead, the farm has just been foreclosed, and Billy is being raised by friends.

 

He is surprised to find that his father left him several thousand dollars in cash and his old Studebaker. Surprise # 2 comes when Billy insists that he and Emmett should set off to find their mother in San Francisco, it being the last place from which she sent a postcard—8 years earlier.  Billy is a precocious kid with a love of maps and a head full of arcane/dubious information from a book he thinks will help them: Compendium of Heroes, Adventurers, and Other Intrepid Travelers by Professor Abacus Abernathy. As far as Billy’s concerned, that book might as well be the Bible.

 

But the biggest surprise of all is that two of Emmett’s friends from the reform school—Wallace Wolcott “Woolly” Martin and Daniel “Dutchess” Hewett—stowed away in the trunk of the warden’s car that deposited Emmett back home. What a pair of characters they are! Woolly comes from a lot of money, but he is 18 going on 10, if you discount his drinking and carousing. Dutchess was sent up for a theft he didn’t commit and he’s on the opposite end of the SES scale; it was his no-account actor father who framed him! Neither is exactly goal-oriented or has a very good sense of what belongs to them. Toss in maternal Sally Ransom, who is sweet on Emmett, down on her banker father, and possesses a mind of her own.

 

What transpires is a zigzag road trip to California by way of the Dakotas, New York City, and several stops east and west in between. Towles’ story is a mix of Huckleberry Finn, Bound for Glory, Travels with Charley, O’ Brother Where Art Thou? and The Odyssey­—all of which takes place over 10 days and is told in count-down form. You name it and it happens:  impulsive “borrowing” of Emmett’s car, a visit to a Catholic orphanage, hopping freight trains, danger on the rails, a black hobo camp, conmen, revenge, the discovery of exotic foods (like artichokes and fettuccini), cops looking for AWOL Woolly and Dutchess, a visit to the Empire State Building, a sad black man who—courtesy of Billy—identifies with Ulysses, double-crosses, and a morality play about greed.

 

As you probably surmised, this is a sprawling novel. It is often humorous, yet it’s also poignant, moving, and tragic. Amor Towles is simply an amazing author. He writes, “Wouldn’t it have been wonderful… if everybody’s life was like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. Then no one person’s life would ever be an inconvenience to anyone else’s. It would just fit snuggly in its very own, specially designed spot, and in so doing, would enable the whole intricate picture to become complete.” Yeah, if only. But some pieces are simply the wrong shape.

 

Rob Weir