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With four kids in an old studebaker, amor towles takes readers on a real joyride.

Heller McAlpin

The Lincoln Highway is a joyride. Amor Towles ' new Great American Road Novel tails four boys — three 18-year-olds who met in a juvenile reformatory, plus a brainy 8-year-old — as they set out from Nebraska in June, 1954, in an old Studebaker in pursuit of a better future. If this book were set today, their constant detours and U-turns would send GPS into paroxysms of navigational recalculations. But hitch onto this delightful tour de force and you'll be pulled straight through to the end, helpless against the inventive exuberance of Towles' storytelling.

Like his first two novels, The Lincoln Highway is elegantly constructed and compulsively readable. Again, one of the ideas Towles explores is how evil can be offset by decency and kindness on any rung of the socio-economic ladder. His first novel, Rules of Civility (2011), set among social strivers in New York City in 1936, took its inspiration from F. Scott Fitzgerald and its title from George Washington's Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation . His much-loved second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), incorporated nods toward the great Russian writers and shades of Eloise at the Plaza and Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel . Mostly confined to a single setting — Moscow's luxurious Metropol Hotel — it spanned 32 years under Stalin's grim rule.

Towles' new novel ranges further geographically — from Nebraska's farmland to New York's Adirondacks by way of some of New York City's iconic sites — but its action-packed plot is compressed into just 10 days. The Lincoln Highway, which owes a debt to Huckleberry Finn, revisits American myths with a mix of warm-hearted humor and occasional outbursts of physical violence and malevolence that recall E.L. Doctorow's work, including Ragtime .

The novel begins on June 12, 1954 and ends on the same date, clearly not coincidentally, as A Gentleman in Moscow . When we meet him, Towles' latest hero, Emmett Watson, has been released a few months early from detention in consideration of his father's death, the foreclosure of the family farm, and his responsibility for his 8-year-old brother, Billy. (Billy has been ably taken care of by a neighbor's hard-working daughter, Sally, during Emmett's absence; she's another terrific character.) The kindly warden who drives Emmett home reminds him that what sent him to the Kansas reformatory was "the ugly side of chance," but now he's paid his debt to society and has his whole life ahead of him.

Shortly after the warden drives off, two fellow inmates turn up, stowaways from the warden's trunk — trouble-maker Duchess and his hapless but sweet protegé, Woolly. (In another fun connection for Towles nerds, naïve trust funder Wallace "Woolly" Wolcott Martin is the nephew of Wallace Wolcott from Rules of Civility. )

Eagerness to discover what landed these three disparate musketeers in custody is one of many things that keeps us turning pages. Expectations are repeatedly upended. One takeaway is that a single wrong turn can set you off course for years — though not necessarily irrevocably.

'A Gentleman In Moscow' Is A Grand Hotel Adventure

Author Interviews

Idea for 'gentleman in moscow' came from many nights in luxury hotels.

The Lincoln Highway is, among other things, about the act of storytelling and mythmaking. The novel probes questions about how to structure a narrative and where to start; its chapters count down from Ten to One as they build to a knockout climax. Towles' intricately plotted tale is underpinned by young Billy's obsession with a big red alphabetical compendium of 26 heroes and adventurers — both mythical and real — from Achilles to Zorro, though the letter Y is left blank for You (the reader) to record your own intrepid quest.

Billy is determined to follow the Lincoln Highway west to San Francisco, where he hopes to find his mother, who abandoned her family when he was a baby and Emmett was 8. (The number 8 figures repeatedly, a reflection of the travelers' — and life's — roundabout, recursive route.) Whether riding boxcars or "borrowed" cars, Towles' characters are constantly diverted by one life-threatening adventure after another — offering Billy plenty of material for a rousing Chapter Y, once he figures out where to begin. One thing smart Billy comes to realize: He belongs to a long tradition of sidekicks who come to save the day.

"Most of us shell our days like peanuts. One in a thousand can look at the world with amazement," Towles wrote in his first novel. Of course, Towles is drawn to that one in a thousand. His interest is in those whose zeal has not yet been tamped down by what Duchess (the only first-person narrator) describes, with improbable flair for a poorly-educated 18-year-old, as "the thumb of reality on that spot in the soul from which youthful enthusiasm springs." With the exception of Woolly, the teenagers in this novel are remarkably mature by today's standards, and burdened by cares. But at any age, it's the young-at-heart who are most open to amazement — people like Woolly, who may not be cut out for this world but who can appreciate what he calls a "one-of-a-kind of day."

There's so much to enjoy in this generous novel packed with fantastic characters — male and female, black and white, rich and poor — and filled with digressions, magic tricks, sorry sagas, retributions, and the messy business of balancing accounts. "How easily we forget — we in the business of storytelling — that life was the point all along," Towles' oldest character comments as he heads off on an unexpected adventure. It's something Towles never forgets.

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THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY

by Amor Towles ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 5, 2021

An exhilarating ride through Americana.

Newly released from a work farm in 1950s Kansas, where he served 18 months for involuntary manslaughter, 18-year-old Emmett Watson hits the road with his little brother, Billy, following the death of their father and the foreclosure of their Nebraska farm.

They leave to escape angry townspeople who believe Emmett got off easy, having caused the fatal fall of a taunting local boy by punching him in the nose. The whip-smart Billy, who exhibits OCD–like symptoms, convinces Emmett to drive them to San Francisco to reunite with their mother, who left town eight years ago. He insists she's there, based on postcards she sent before completely disappearing from their lives. But when Emmett's prized red Studebaker is "borrowed" by two rambunctious, New York–bound escapees from the juvie facility he just left, Emmett takes after them via freight train with Billy in tow. Billy befriends a Black veteran named Ulysses who's been riding the rails nonstop since returning home from World War II to find his wife and baby boy gone. A modern picaresque with a host of characters, competing points of view, wandering narratives, and teasing chapter endings, Towles' third novel is even more entertaining than his much-acclaimed A Gentleman in Moscow (2016). You can quibble with one or two plot turns, but there's no resisting moments such as Billy's encounter, high up in the Empire State Building in the middle of the night, with professor Abacus Abernathe, whose Compendium of Heroes, Adventurers, and Other Intrepid Travelers he's read 24 times. A remarkable blend of sweetness and doom, Towles' novel is packed with revelations about the American myth, the art of storytelling, and the unrelenting pull of history.

Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-73-522235-9

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: June 21, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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PERSPECTIVES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

BOOK TO SCREEN

SEEN & HEARD

THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring  passeurs : people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the  Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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Review: The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles is a big work of fiction about the complicated journey of adulthood.

Towles’ previous book A Gentleman in Moscow published in 2016—I loved that novel and thought it was such a warmhearted tale. It spent two years on the New York Times bestsellers list and wow, what a hard accomplishment to follow. As a result, The Lincoln Highway was met with much anticipation.

I’ve actually owned The Lincoln Highway for months but the size is daunting (588 pages). I was also unsure of the story—18-year-old men on a road trip throughout the U.S. Still, I’ve seen so much praise but also plenty of negative reviews too so I was quite curious to read the story for myself.

And whew, I have so many thoughts. I felt everything from intrigue to boredom at times to absolute shock. This story is not what I expected in the slightest, which made for both an enlightening reading experience but also a bit of a confusing one as well. I go back and forth about what I think overall so here’s my attempt to digest it for you.

If you’ve read the book and would like to talk all things spoilers —head over to my discussion about the ending here .

What’s the Story About

First, I do think calling this novel The Lincoln Highway is a bit misleading. I thought it was going to be a road trip/buddy story that took the reader on the actual Lincoln Highway where I assumed we would visit plenty of small towns on the journey, meet interesting and quirky people and get to the final destination in a big, grand finale kind of way.

That’s not what happens. It is a journey, but more about boys becoming men and trying to find their place in a post-world society in 1954. The Lincoln Highway does make an appearance but two of our main characters don’t even get to really travel on it. Catchy title but not exactly accurate to the story.

We meet eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson as he arrives home to Nebraska from a juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His father has passed away and his mother left the family and with the family farm recently foreclosed by the bank, Emmett decides that he needs to take his eight-year-old brother Billy to another state where they can begin a new life.

However, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden’s car who drove him home. In a turn of events, they all began a fateful journey to New York.

Multi-Perspectives

We read the story from the third-hand perspectives of Emmett; his brother Billy; Woolly, one of the friends who escaped the work farm and several other characters. But we read the first-person perspectives of Duchess, the other friend who escaped the work farm and Sally, one of Emmett’s friends from Nebraska. It’s interesting that the author Amor Towles decided to shift perceptive like that. I have a theory of why he did that but it’s a bit of a spoiler so I will save it for my let’s talk about the ending article.

It did help having so many characters lend their true perspectives, especially as actions are sometimes different from their thoughts. There’s also some unreliable narration going on as well.

Although, I will say, Emmett is clearly our protagonist where Duchess is something else… to be honest, I wasn’t a fan of Duchess the moment he arrived and I didn’t love reading his perspective. I did not find him charming or misunderstood but more of a nuisance and with him having such a big role, that is one reason I did not love this novel.

That said, I do think the novel could have been trimmed—almost 600 pages is quite long. And there were areas I felt completed dragged and I started to lose interest. I’m not sure why they thought the longer the better as I think a more tighter story would have been stronger.

Much of the novel features Amor Towles in his signature style—warmhearted, big and epic storytelling.

However, the last 60 or so pages really came out of left field for me. When I finished it, my husband asked how it was and I said, “I’m unsure.” Again, it’s a long novel but bizarrely, it almost changes in tone and genre, especially toward the end.

As I write this, it’s been 24 hours since I’ve finished it and I’ve thought about it quite often since then. The more I think about it, I see where there are hints of something a bit more sinister lurking from several of the characters. I do see where the author laid the ground work for what was to happen but I feel the sudden shift was still jarring.

So what are my thoughts overall? I think the book is beautifully-written—Amor Towles really can write a truly masterful novel. But I do feel that the story missed the mark in several areas and I felt it dragged too. I’m still unsure about the tone shift because while shocking, it did not give a satisfying ending. I think this needed either an epilogue or promise of a sequel.

So all in all, I did not love the novel but I didn’t actively dislike it either. Disappointed in some areas but I did enjoy other aspects.

But again, that ending will get people talking so this novel is ideal for book clubs in many ways. For book clubs, check out my discussion questions here . And if you want to talk about the ending specifically, visit my post here.

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Saturday 28th of May 2022

I agree. Enjoyed the beginning but became bored by the end. Far too long.

'The Lincoln Highway' was named Amazon's Best Book of 2021— here's why I finished this almost-600-page novel in one weekend

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• Amazon Editors compile an annual list of the best books they read that year .
• In 2021, " The Lincoln Highway " by Amor Towles earned the Best Book of the Year award.
• I devoured this book in one weekend and now understand the heaping praise it received. 

Recently, Amazon named " The Lincoln Highway " its Best Book of 2021 , noting it as a unanimously agreed-upon crowd-favorite amongst its editors, who read and review hundreds of books each year. 

" The Lincoln Highway " is most centrally about Emmett Watson, an 18-year-old boy who has just completed his one-year sentence at a work farm for involuntary manslaughter. Returning home in 1954, he retrieves his younger brother and the two decide to travel west along the Lincoln Highway to California, where they hope to find their mother who ran away many years prior. 

This novel was the Jenna's Book Club pick for October 2021 and has a significant approval rating amongst Goodreads reviewers , with 86% of readers giving it a 4- or 5-star review, leading to its selection as a nominee for Best Historical Fiction Novel in the Goodreads Choice Awards . You may also recognize the author, Amor Towles, from his 2016 historical fiction bestseller " A Gentleman in Moscow ," which was nominated for several past awards as well. 

With all the rave reviews and praise surrounding " The Lincoln Highway ," I grabbed a copy, finished it in one weekend, and finally understood why readers can't stop talking about this book. 

Here are 3 reasons readers love "The Lincoln Highway": 

1. each character is expertly fleshed out and feels like a distinct person..

While many blurbs of this novel focus on Emmett Watson, the book is equally about his kid brother, Billy, and his friends from the work farm, Duchess and Woolly, who stowed away in the car that brought Emmett home. While Emmett and Billy plan to head west, Duchess continually derails the group's plans and draws them to New York in search of a small, stashed fortune.

For most readers, the characters are what makes this novel so great. This story is told over 10 days from multiple points of view, each of which propels the novel forward as we dig deeper and deeper into its protagonists' lives.

2. Amor Towles' poetic writing style enhances the plot.

One of the biggest reasons this novel is so popular is because of Amor Towles' storytelling. The prose is enchanting and enthralling, shifting between moments of comedy and drama. There's something about the writing in this novel that not only reminds us of the classics but begs to be considered a classic in its own right.  

Some of the criticism of this book comes from readers who simply didn't connect with Towles' writing style, which boils down to individual taste; not every book is for everyone. Around a third of the way through the novel, I did start to wonder how the story had gotten so off track from the initial description — until I realized it was intentional. As soon as I decided to trust the author and follow the story wherever it may go, I fell in love with the book and happily got lost in its pages. 

Though this novel sits at nearly 600 pages and more than 16 hours as an audiobook , the time flew by as Towles captivated me with adventure after gripping adventure until I was suddenly at the heart-breaking conclusion of a book I wasn't ready to close. 

3. "The Lincoln Highway" reads like a classic American novel about hope and seeking a fresh start.

Despite the title, this story is barely about the Lincoln Highway. As Emmett and Billy begin to plan their trip west, it's immediately derailed by Duchess and Woolly's appearance. Their hijinx, adventures, and missteps take the boys farther from their intended destination but closer to where they need to be, even if they don't realize it. 

Each memorable character in this novel is on their own unique journey toward a fresh start. Emmett is looking to start over after his sentence, Billy is looking to reunite with his mother after losing his dad, Duchess is looking for riches to start a restaurant, and Woolly is looking to find family in his friendships. But for each of these characters, their pasts follow them throughout the story and prove inescapable, at least in the ways they were hoping they'd be. 

Ultimately, this is a story of hope, centered around young and optimistic characters who are still filled with innocence and determination. Perhaps, as the second pandemic year comes to a close, readers are gravitating towards novels like this one because they especially cherish stories of promise, friendship, and nostalgia right now.

The bottom line

" The Lincoln Highway " is a captivating story that reads like a classic and offers readers a hopeful message as this year comes to a close. It's a great read to pick up if you're looking for a nostalgic adventure and are ready to fall in love with some incredibly fleshed-out characters. 

You can find the rest of Amazon's best books of 2021 here .

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How Amor Towles’ quintessential American road trip novel interrogates itself

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The Lincoln Highway

By Amor Towles Viking: 592 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

“Well, that’s life in a nutshell, ain’t it,” says Duchess, recently escaped from a boys’ detention center in Salina, Kan., and recently arrived at his friend Emmett’s Nebraska farm. “Lovin’ to go to one place and havin’ to go to another.”

Duchess, the felonious foil to law-abiding Emmett, does not open Amor Towles’ new novel, “ The Lincoln Highway ,” with those words. But they capture the essence of this old-fashioned, meandering tale of two orphaned brothers in the 1950s and their journey in search of a future.

Not much links this novel with Towles’ other work — “ Rules of Civility ” and “ A Gentleman in Moscow ,” two books that also have little in common except their historicity and their popularity. Here the author has chosen that most American of icons for his title and plot: a famous highway , dedicated in 1913, that not only spans the vast country from east to west but is named for the president who united its north and south. That’s a wide load of metaphor for any book to bear, even one nearly 600 pages long.

Still, like the infrastructure we once built and reliably maintained, “The Lincoln Highway” bears its weight easily — and Towles never pushes things too far. Honest Abe makes an appearance as a statue in a park, but readers must make some connections for themselves instead of having them thrust textually upon them.

Eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson, who spent nearly a year behind Salina’s hard walls before being released, wants more than anything to get home to Morgen, Neb., and his 8-year-old brother, Billy. He knows their mother has vanished, and he isn’t surprised to find their profligate father has died after running the farm into the ground. Only their neighbor Sally, who nurses more than a crush on Emmett, arrives to help, bearing a chicken casserole and a jar of her strawberry preserves and having already stocked the refrigerator with perishables.

Amor Towles: A gentleman in New York

In the last month, Amor Towles says, he’s been getting notes from readers.

Dec. 21, 2016

In the garage, Emmett finds what’s most important to him, after Billy: His 1948 Studebaker Land Cruiser. He has sensible plans to take Billy to Texas, where he can start buying modest houses and flipping them until he’s amassed enough real estate to set them up on firm financial ground.

Billy has other plans. He functions as the deus ex machina of the book; not only does he set events in motion, he also has an almost magical ability to pull just the right story out for the strangers he meets along the way — mainly from “Professor Abacus Abernathe’s Compendium of Heroes, Adventurers, and Other Intrepid Travelers” — a gift from the Morgen town librarian.

The book-within-the-novel is both a convenient source of nested tales and a thematic vector, indicating Towles’ commitment to wrestling with classic Americana — that braid of fact, fiction and derring-do so many of us recognize as a birthright, for better or worse. Billy’s own corn-fed idealism leavens the sometimes-bleak travails along our heroes’ journey.

Just as Billy convinces Emmett they should take the titular highway to San Francisco and find their absent mother, enter Duchess and his comrade Woolly, unannounced and unwanted. They stowed away in the trunk of the car that brought Emmett home.

You can almost guess what’s going to happen the minute Duchess sets his eyes on the Studebaker. After he and Woolly hit the road in that car, Emmett and Billy hit the rails to catch up with them in New York City. The alternating adventures of these pairs hit many different notes, from chaotic (boys in an orphanage bestowed an unsupervised treat) to frightening (a railway bum calling himself Pastor threatens to throw Billy from the train) to wondrous (Emmett’s first sight of Manhattan). Their travels follow the contours and rhythms, the on- and off-ramps of America’s highways, which send us off wherever we desire to go. Or, more accurately, wherever fortune dictates.

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That notion of American openness, of ever-fractalizing free will, coming up against the fickle realities of fate is the tension that powers Towles’ exciting, entertaining and sometimes implausible picaresque.

At one point, Emmett considers the tall tales in Billy’s beloved Abernathe compendium: “What good could possibly come from mixing the lives of these men with stories of mythical heroes setting sail on fabled waters to battle fantastical beasts? By tossing them together, it seemed to Emmett, Abernathe was encouraging a boy to believe that the great scientific discoverers were not exactly real and the heroes of legend not exactly imagined. That shoulder to shoulder they traveled through the realms of the known and unknown making the most of their intelligence and courage, yes, but also of sorcery and enchantment and the occasional intervention of the gods.”

The Lincoln Highway can take people east and west but not north and south, nor high nor deep. Journeying beyond that single axis requires the alchemy of Abernathe, the infusion of fiction, adventure, myth. In one of the best scenes in this lovely new novel, Billy meets a Black man named Ulysses whose World War II post-traumatic stress disorder has distanced him from both his family and himself. When Billy explains the origins of the name “ Ulysses ” to him, relying again on Professor Abernathe, the man is moved to tears. Stories can bring us back to ourselves, Towles seems to say, if only we are open to receiving their power.

But no story, no matter how powerful, can endow Towles’ Ulysses, a man of color in 1950s America, with the freedom that even the poorest white characters in “The Lincoln Highway” take for granted. Think of Colson Whitehead’s “ The Nickel Boys ,” in which a midcentury reform school is not the launching pad for adventures but a destroyer of lives.

Some stories take us to places we love and places we don’t — or to one destination when we would prefer to reach another. It’s our decision to keep reading, or not. Anyone who follows “The Lincoln Highway” will relish the trip, bearing in mind that there are roads not taken, whether by choice or for the absence of one.

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Oct. 2, 2020

Patrick is a freelance critic who tweets @TheBookMaven .

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Whenever I come to a new town, I like to get my bearings. I want to understand the layout of the streets and the layout of the people. In some cities this can take you days to accomplish. In Boston, it can take you weeks. In New York, years. The great thing about Morgen, Nebraska, is it only took a few minutes.

The town was laid out in a geometric grid with the courthouse right in the middle. According to the mechanic who’d given me a lift in his tow truck, back in the 1880s the town elders spent a whole week deliberating how best to christen the streets before deciding—with an eye to the future—that the east-west streets would be named for presidents and the north-south streets for trees. As it turned out, they could have settled on seasons and suits because seventy-five years later the town was still only four blocks square.

—Howdy, I said to the two ladies coming in the opposite direction, neither of whom said howdy back.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There’s a certain charm to a town like this. And there’s a certain kind of person who would rather live here than anywhere else—even in the twentieth century. Like a person who wants to make some sense of the world. Living in the big city, rushing around amid all that hammering and clamoring, the events of life can begin to seem random. But in a town this size, when a piano falls out of a window and lands on a fellow’s head, there’s a good chance you’ll know why he deserved it.

[ Return to the review of “The Lincoln Highway.” ]

At any rate, Morgen was the sort of town where when something out of the ordinary happens, a crowd is likely to gather. And sure enough, when I came around the courthouse, there was a semicircle of citizens ready to prove the point. From fifty feet away I could tell they were a representative sample of the local electorate. There were hayseeds in hats, dowagers with handbags, and lads in dungarees. Fast approaching was even a mother with a stroller and a toddler at her side.

Tossing the rest of my ice cream cone in the trash, I walked over to get a closer look. And who did I find at center stage? None other than Emmett Watson—being taunted by some corn-fed kid with a corn-fed grievance.

The people who had gathered to watch seemed excited, at least in a midwestern sort of way. They weren’t shouting or grinning, but they were glad to have happened along at just the right moment. It would be something they could talk about in the barbershop and hair salon for weeks to come.

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Review: 'The Lincoln Highway,' by Amor Towles

Fiction: brothers take to the road in the latest novel from amor towles..

By Connie Ogle

Special to the Star Tribune

Amor Towles' follow-up to his bestselling book "A Gentleman in Moscow" arrives on a wave of anticipation, at a time when we long for simpler days. Set in 1950s America, "The Lincoln Highway" is a road novel that celebrates the mythos of an era via a cross-country highway, and it delivers an overwhelming blast of nostalgia that many readers will welcome even if it doesn't add anything new to the genre.

Like the highway, the novel is long, and it winds through adventures in the style of an old-fashioned serial, with an abundance of last-second rescues and romantic philosophizing (about the moral caliber of men who can take a punch, codes of honor and the need to "balance the accounts" in life). The philosophizing does not always spring from the most trustworthy of sources. Still, "The Lincoln Highway" is a romantic novel, not in a passion-and-courtship sense but in its idealization of the era.

The story follows the fortunes of two brothers of a familiar type: strong, silent Emmett and innocent, optimistic Billy. Emmett, 18, has just returned home to Nebraska after serving a sentence at a juvenile work farm (he accidentally killed another boy in a fight). The boys' father is dead, and a neighbor has been caring for Billy.

With the family farm in foreclosure, all that's left for the brothers to do is follow in the footsteps of generations before them: Go West. In California, Emmett hopes to build houses, while Billy believes they will find the mother who abandoned them.

Two escapees from the work farm derail their plan: Woolly, heir of a wealthy New York family; and Duchess, the abandoned son of a traveling actor. Duchess' sociopathic tendencies will present most (though not all) of the novel's conflicts, his actions rerouting the brothers to that other testing ground for dreams: New York City.

Readers hungry for the past will delight in this travelogue's touchstones, which include (but are not limited to) Studebakers, orphans, Phillips 66, foldable road maps, the orange roof atop every Howard Johnson's, Sinatra, homemade preserves, postcards that are not yet vintage but will be, hidden treasure, trains with open boxcars, saintly heroes and dangerous hobos, dutiful but plucky good girls and naughty women with hearts of gold. Don't look for shades of gray; you won't find them. Towles does introduce two intriguing Black characters, but they exist only to serve the brothers' story, which is a shame, since they're both more interesting than stoic, one-dimensional Emmett.

A skeptic might be tempted to view this parade of Americana with a weary eye. Knowing what to make of such a nostalgic surge is hard; social media has sharpened and enhanced our cynicism. But Towles isn't an ironic writer; he's not mocking the American dream. He's reveling in it.

Maybe for the reader, as for Emmett and Billy, the journey is the point. The road is long, after all, and "The Lincoln Highway" ends with unfinished business. What's more American than a sequel?

Connie Ogle is a book critic in Florida.

The Lincoln Highway

By: Amor Towles.

Publisher: Viking, 592 pages, $30.

Event: Talking Volumes, 7 p.m. Oct. 13, Fitzgerald Theater, 10 E. Exchange St., St. Paul, tickets $22.50-$32.50, mprevents.org .

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The Lincoln Highway (Review, Recap & Full Summary)

By amor towles.

Book review, full book summary and synopsis for The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles, a story about four young men journeying from Nebraska to New York City set in 1950's America.

In The Lincoln Highway , eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska in June 1954 by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter.

His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew.

But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden's car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett's future, one that will take them all on a fateful journey in the opposite direction—to the City of New York.

Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles's third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes.

(The Full Plot Summary is also available, below)

Full Plot Summary

The two-paragraph version: Emmett (18) has just gotten out of juvie and is now planning to drive down the Lincoln Highway to move to San Francisco with his younger brother Billy (8). Billy hopes to find their mother (who left them 8 years ago) there. However, two guys (Duchess and Woolly) have snuck out from juvie and have followed Emmett home, hoping to convince him to help with a caper in New York to take back Woolly's $150K trust fund (which Woolly has been deemed "unfit" to access). When Emmett declines, Duchess "borrows" Emmett's car, forcing Emmet and Billy to stowaway on a train to New York to find Duchess and Woolly and reclaim it. They are aided by Sally, a family friend, and Ulysses, a black man they meet on the train.

Meanwhile, Duchess is also trying to settle some debts against along the way, and he attacks their former warden and other people. When they finally all reach Woolly's grandfather's lakeside house (where the safe with the money is), it turns out Woolly doesn't even know the combination to the safe. Woolly kills himself (which Emmett thinks was his plan all along since he was unhappy and misunderstood by his family), and Emmett and Duchess have a confrontation that turns violent. Ultimately, Billy is able to guess the safe combination, and Emmett puts Duchess (who can't swim) in a leaky boat on the lake with his share of the money. The book ends with Billy, Emmett and Sally heading off to San Francisco, while Duchess drowns trying to save his money from flying away (rather than floating back to safety).

(The book chapters count down from 10 to 1.)

Chapters 10 and 9 open with Emmett Watson (18) returning home to Morgen, Nebraska (dropped off by Warden Williams ) after having spent a year in juvenile detention for killing Jimmy Snyder . Jimmy was a troublemaker who had goaded Emmett into punching him. It caused Jimmy to fall and hit his head on a cinder block, resulting in his death.

In present day, Emmett learns his father's farm is being foreclosed upon by the bank. When Emmett tells his younger brother, Billy (8), that they will need to move, Billy suggests they move to San Francisco. Billy has recently found some old postcards indicating their mother (who left them 8 years ago) once took the journey there down the Lincoln Highway. Billy hopes she might still be living there now. While Emmett thinks his brother's plan of tracking down their mother in California is crazy, he knows that California (due to its high population growth) is a good place for him to pursue his goal of achieving financial stability by renovating and selling houses. After some research, he agrees to the plan.

They're soon interrupted by the presence of Duchess and Woolly , two guys Emmett knows from juvie. Duchess spent a few years in an orphanage, being raised by nuns, after his father abandoned him there for two years when he was 8. Meanwhile, Woolly is a troubled rich kid.

They explain that they stowed away in Warden Williams's trunk and have a proposition for Emmett. Woolly is the beneficiary of a trust fund that should have come under his control now that he's 18. However, his brother-in-law Dennis had him declared "unfit". There's also a wall safe at his great-grandfather's house in upstate New York that contains roughly the same amount of money as his trust fund, $150,000. They want Emmett to go with them to help Woolly get the cash, and in exchange they'll split the money evenly among the three of them. Emmett immediately declines.

The next morning, Sally Ransom , their neighbor and a former romantic interest of Emmett's drops by. She's upset to learn from Duchess that Emmett plans on leaving. In town, Jake Snyder (brother of Jimmy Snyder) accosts Emmett, trying to goad him into a fight and then punching Emmett a few times, though Emmett doesn't fight back.

In Chapters 8 and 7 , they hit the road with the plan of dropping Woolly and Duchess off at the bus stop in Omaha before Emmett and Billy continue on to San Francisco. However, Duchess derails the plan. He asks them to make a pit stop at the orphanage he stayed in for a few years as a child (because his father abandoned him there temporarily). There, he causes a commotion and then drives off with Woolly in Emmett's car (and inadvertently with all of Emmett's money), headed to New York. He promises to be back soon and to give Emmett his share of the cash when they return.

With no money and no mode of transportation, Emmett and Billy hitch a ride on a train to go to New York to track down Duchess and Woolly. On the train, Billy nearly gets his silver coin collection stolen from him by a fake pastor, "Pastor" John , but Pastor John is stopped by Ulysses -- a black WWII vet who is also hitching a ride on the train. Ulysses is a seasoned boxcar traveler, who has been iterant ever since he returned from the war to learn that his wife left him.

Billy gets to know Ulysses, and he tells Ulysses the legend of the Greek hero Ulysses. Billy has been reading an abridged version of from a big red book authored by someone named Professor Abacus Abernathe . The book features a number of great travelers and adventurers, both real and fictional.

Meanwhile, Duchess and Woolly have driven as far as Illinois by now. Duchess plans to start a new life after all of this and wants to clear out any debts he owes or owed to him before he does. They make a quick stop at the house of the retired former warden, Ackerly , who used to beat them. Duchess hits him on the head with a cast-iron skillet and leaves, noting that Ackerly's debt to him has been paid.

In Chapters 6 and 5 , they all make their way to New York. Duchess's goes looking for his father ( Harry ), who is trying to evade him after learning that Duchess escaped from juvie. Duchess finds Fitzy FitzWilliams , an old friend of Harry. We learn that when Duchess was 16, he framed by Harry for a number of thefts in the hotel they were living in (which Harry had actually committed). Fitzy lied in a statement to corroborate Harry's lie. In present day, Duchess guilts Fitzy into giving him Harry's current address in Syracuse.

Afterwards, Duchess goes to visit Townhouse, who was released from Salina a while ago. He wants to settle accounts with him, since Duchess owes Townhouse for having gotten Townhouse in trouble once. The two get squared away, and before Duchess leaves, he impulsively gives Townhouse's cousin Maurice the keys to Emmett's Studebaker (he thinks of it as a good deed that he's doing).

Elsewhere, Ulysses takes Billy and Emmett to a vagrant camp where they can stay for the night. Emmett goes into the city to track down Duchess, who knows is looking for his father. He gets Harry's former address from his agency. It leads him to Fitzy, who tells him about Duchess's past and also gives him Harry's Syracuse address.

Meanwhile, Woolly visits his sister Sarah who says that she has talked to Warden Williams, who is offering Woolly minimal consequences if he returns to juvie immediately. And back at that camp, Ulysses and Billy are attacked by Pastor John. However, Ulysses kills him and drops his body into the river.

In Chapters 4 and 3 , Emmett goes to visit Townhouse, who warns that the police recently came by looking for Duchess. He thinks it's about something more serious than Duchess's escape from Salina. He also returns Emmett's Studebaker to him, and his friends offer to repaint it since the police seem to have associated as blue Studebaker with whatever crime Duchess committed. Townhouse then directs Emmett to where Duchess will be that night, which turns out to be a raunchy circus show attached to a brothel. Emmett confronts Duchess and tries to get him to leave. However, Duchess drugs Emmett, leaves him at the brothel and ducks out.

Before heading to Sarah's place, the group passes by the location described in Billy's big red book as the offices of Professor Abacus Abernathe. They go to visit him and see that he's a real person. Billy tells Abacus about his own adventures. Abacus asks to meet Ulysses, and the two become acquainted.

Back at Sarah's place, Emmett eventually shows up. However, because he wasn't able to check in with Sally as he'd promised earlier, Sally ends up heading to New York (after attempting to call them) to check on Emmett and Billy. She arrives soon after Emmett. They all have a delightful dinner, but soon Dennis and Sarah come home. Dennis is furious to learn that Woolly is not at Salina. He demands that Woolly go work for one of his stockbroker friends after he finishes his sentence.

In Chapter 2 , Woolly and Duchess sneak out early and make their way to Woolly's great-grandfather's house in the Adirondacks in order to take the $150K from the safe. However, when they arrive, it turns out Woolly doesn't know the combination (and it never occurred to him there would be one). Then, as Duchess tries to hack open the safe, Woolly takes a bunch of pills and kills himself.

Elsewhere, Abacus thinks about how Billy has reawakened his desire for adventure. He decides to go with Ulysses to travel via boxcar and seek out his own adventure.

In Chapter 1 , Emmett arrives at Woolly's great-grandfather's house to find Woolly dead and Duchess still trying to get the safe open. Emmett and Duchess scuffle, and Emmett knocks Duchess out. (He doesn't kill Duchess because he had made a promise to Billy not to lash out again.) Meanwhile, Billy guesses the safe combination based on something Woolly had said about his great-grandfather loving the 4th of July. They also find Woolly's will, splitting up his $150K trust fund equally between Billy, Emmett and Duchess.

The book ends with Emmett leaving Duchess in a leaky boat with no oars and with his $50K share in cash. As Duchess tries to get to the money before it flies away, he drowns. Meanwhile, Emmett and Billy head for San Francisco. Sally joins them (platonically) so she can start a new life out there as well.

For more detail, see the full Chapter-by-Chapter Summary .

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Book Review

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles is a book I’ve really been looking forward to ever since it was announced. Like many people, I really enjoyed his previous novel A Gentleman in Moscow , and I’ve been eager to revisit his writing.

Blue 1948 Studebaker Land Cruiser

The Lincoln Highway is an adventure story through and through. It tells the story of two brothers with a plan to travel down the Lincoln Highway from Nebraska to San Francisco, though their plans quickly get derailed from the onset.

I loved the tone and the atmosphere of this novel. The sense of adventure and knowing that the book has exciting times and surprises in store for you made it easy for me to look forward to what was coming next.

I also appreciated the journey that Towles takes each character on. He slowly reveals their character and backstory in a way that’s surprising and engaging. In general, I appreciated the parts of the characters that were complex and imperfect.

Beyond that, every section of this book feels crafted for a particular purpose, to bring the story forward in a particular way, though you may not realize it at the time. Like in A Gentleman in Moscow , Towles sets up specific plot points early on throughout the story, knowing he plans on revisiting them in a way that feels gratifying when you reach the later parts of the book.

Some Criticisms

That said, I didn’t fall in love with this book the way I was hoping to. In terms of the main character, Emmett felt a little vanilla at times to me, like a very generic leading man. He was easily the most predictable of the characters, which make him the least interesting to me. Meanwhile, while they were certainly less predictable, both Duchess and Woolly were a little much , in that they were too devious or too ridiculous at times. Something about them just felt a little cartoonish to me.

Meanwhile, Billy is the stereotypical precocious and overly-curious kid that movies and books love to cast in their stories. Moreover, the whole idea that Emmett would ever take Billy on this incredibly dangerous trip when there is a perfectly safe and caring place he could stay requires a lot of suspension of disbelief. It made it a lot harder to take this book seriously.

It’s a book that seems to want to feel grand and epic in scope — four adventurers traveling across the United States! — but doesn’t quite get there. The frequent references to things like Shakespeare, Odysseus, and other legendary characters only underscored for me how much smaller and less emotionally-impactful this story feels.

There are definitely moments where this book shines and it seems to capture precisely the fun, adventurous, freewheeling feeling it seems to be going for — but there’s some unevenness to it. Mixed in there are equal stretches of text when the story drags a little and feels a little mundane.

Read it or Skip it?

If you’re someone who loves a good adventure or a journey à la The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or something of that vein, The Lincoln Highway will probably be right up your ally. For the most part, it really captures that excitement of not knowing who they’ll come across next or what hijinks the various characters will get up to.

However, as I said before, I liked it, but I didn’t love it. While there was a fun sense of adventure, the story didn’t feel as epic as it seemed to be trying to be, and it didn’t seem to have a strong emotional pull to make me fall in love with it. It’s a long book that’s worth the time and effort, but it also often feels long as you’re reading it, if you know what I mean.

I think most book clubs could enjoy this though. Like I said, there’s plenty of discovery, adventure and fun hijinks in store if you decide to read it!

The Lincoln Highway Audiobook Review

Narrated by : Edoardo Ballerini, Marin Ireland & Dion Graham Length : 16 hours 38 minutes

I found the audiobook for The Lincoln High to perfectly serviceable and easy to listen to. The narrators all speak in a crisp, soothing well-paced manner.

There wasn’t anything about it that particular stood out to me, but if you’re interested in this story anyway, this audiobook is a great option.

Hear a sample of The Lincoln Highway audiobook on Libro.fm.

Discussion Questions

• How would you describe Emmett and Billy’s personalities? Why do you they are similar or different?
• What do you think about Emmett’s attitude toward Sally? What do you think of her expectations of him and what he seems to think her expectations are?
• What did you think of Emmett’s relationships with his father and mother? Do you think they were good parents to Emmett and do you think they were good people?
• What did you think of the side characters like Ulysses, Sally, Sarah or Professor Abernathe? Whose story interested you the most and why?
• Emmett is conscientious about wanting to protect his brother from questionable activities and less savory elements of life, but Billy seems to romanticize these things. What do you think about the decisions he makes?
• What did you think of the character of Billy? Did you find him believable as a character? Do you think you were similar to him as a kid?
• Why do you think the characters in the book are so concerned with settling debts and dealing with their obligations?
• What did you think of the character of Woolly? Do you think things could have turned out differently for him? What do you think would have needed to happen for his life to turn out differently? Why do you think Woolly is so fixated on avoiding a every-day-kind-of-day? Why do you think Woolly does what he does at the end of the book?
• Do you think Duchess is a good or bad person at heart? Do you think he could have been redeemed? Why do you think his story ended the way it did?
• Why do you think Sally decides to go to San Francisco? What do you think will happen to her father
• What do you think happens after the characters end up in San Francisco? Were you happy with the way the story ended?

Book Excerpt

Read the first pages of The Lincoln Highway

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In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew.

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Lincoln Highway had literary touches similar to A Gentleman in Moscow especially when it diverged to secondary characters. In describing Lincoln Highway to others, it is a modern day Huckleberry Finn/The Wizard of Oz adventure….not on the Mississippi but instead, on America’s oldest highway. While the characters are rendered flawed and at the same time lovable…even Duchess who caused so much havoc along the way. It is Woolly and Billy, each on the opposite end of the intellectual spectrum, who are endowed with a unique sense of insight and prove true goodness. Now, Duchess’ ultimate undoing really bothered me in that, while well deserved, nonetheless proved Emmett really hadn’t “learned his lesson.”

9. My optimistic view on the ending: consider that this is Billy’s book, and everything in it was either witnessed by him or told to him by someone else, or made up. He could not know that Duchess drowned, because he and Emmett drove away in the car. If they were still there, they would have rescued him. So either they were not there, or they did rescue him after he went in the water.

If Billy was not there, then he made up the last bit to 1) fit his hero/morality story agenda about how heroes and anti-heroes die from their one weakness (here greed); and 2) to protect Duchess (and themselves) from the police by telling a made-up story about Duchess’s death, when really he got away with the money, as did Billy and his brother.

After reading Gentle in Moscow, I thought, so what. The story left me cold. I am one third through Lincoln Highway and find myself skipping through the wordiness to get to some point. Don’t think I will persist as I have other books calling me. The book needs a serious edit, taking out all the verbs to be to begin with. One wonders how this writer sells so many books as I don’t think he is a good writer.

My adult daughter and I absolutely loved this book! We finished it in 3 days because we could not put it down. We loved how it was written and cannot wait to read another of his books.

I agree with you about the book. Besides what you wrote, I was also dissatisfied with the ending. I didn’t really understand why Woolly committed suicide. And I didn’t really understand why Emmett set Duchess afloat like that. It seemed too mean for Emmett’s character. Also, Duchess could have just been patient and waited until the wind died on the lake. His emotion and desire for the money overcame his good sense. That was clear; but the Duchess I had come to know in the earlier chapters would have had more sense. Could you comment, please?

In my opinion Wolly committed suicide because he felt he had no other choice. There was clearly something wrong with him mentally and with the book set in the 1950’s there was not much available to him. He didn’t want to keep “fighting” for his life to get better he wanted to go back and revisit the place he was the happiest. Plus the only person in his life that seemed to care was Sarah. It was sad, but I understand that feeling of hopelessness!

I enjoyed the novel but there is one plot device which I found completely implausible. When Emmett realizes Duchess has stolen his car it does not occur to him to call the police and even more unbelievable is that he thinks he and Billy can take a freight train to NY city and there find Duchess and his car. Did he think he and Billy would just stroll around the sidewalks of NY and just by a stroke of luck find Duchess who would then be happy to return the stolen car and the money hidden in it? He is depicted as a smart level headed person so it is hard to believe he could be that naive.

Emmett did not put Duchess in the boat with a hole in it and a promise to Billy not to hurt Duchess any more than he had, so Emmett puts Duchess in the caddie. So who put Duchess in the boat. Well it certainly wasn’t Billy, so that leaves only one person left

Two mistakes/typos in Chapter 1 of this summary.

It is Duchess (NOT Woolly) who is still trying to get the safe open when Emmett arrives at Woolly’s great-grandfather’s house.

The book ends with Emmett leaving Duchess in a leaky boat with no oars (NOT no oaks).

Are the copy editors leaving all their work up to spell-check?

Barb, I didn’t catch those mistakes but a couple things bugged me. The fire that Wooly set at his private school might have burned down the goalpost but it would have been the old style goalpost shaped like an ‘H’, not the kind used today with one post in the ground. When talking about Sally’s truck it’s mentioned that she put something in the back seat but farm trucks in the early fifties didn’t have ‘crewcabs’. Also found it funny that the sheriff, when taking Emmet home, asks if he can smoke in the Studebaker. I think that at that time it was assumed one could smoke anywhere.

Don’t know why I see things like this as it doesn’t really matter but, hey, why not mention it.

Woolly, was my favorite character. Rules of Civility his first book gives reference to Woolly.

I didn’t like the way the book ended at all. Did Duchess really deserve this? I also wasn’t fond of how the author switches back and forth. He leaves one chapter as a cliff hanger and then proceeds onto the next character. I read it because I was determined to finish what I started but would not read it again.

Booklover Book Reviews

The Lincoln Highway, Book Review: Amor Towles’ heroic dogma

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles is filled with characters that charm but international readers may find the anthemic Americana less beguiling. Read my full review.

The Lincoln Highway Book Synopsis

Two brothers venture across 1950s America to New York in the absorbing new novel by the author of the bestselling  A Gentleman in Moscow.

In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter.

With his mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett plans to pick up his eight-year-old brother Billy and head to California to start a new life.

But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have stowed away in the trunk of the warden’s car. They have a very different plan for Emmett’s future, one that will take the four of them on a fateful journey in the opposite direction – to New York City.

Bursting with life, charm, richly imagined settings and unforgettable characters,  The Lincoln Highway  is an extraordinary journey through 1950s America from the pen of a master storyteller.

( Penguin Books Australia , 2021)

Genre: Literature, Historical, Drama, Adventure

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Book Review

After raving over Amor Towles debut novel Rules of Civility , I was very much looking forward to reading his highly anticipated third novel The Lincoln Highway . It is featured in countless Best Books of 2021 lists, and the Amazon Book Review editors even named this their #1 book of the year .

Towles once again displays his skill and dare I say it, devotion to character development. There were multiple characters and descriptions that charmed me.

You’ve got to love that about Woolly. He’s always running about five minutes late, showing up on the wrong platform with the wrong luggage just as the conversation is pulling out of the station.

But, I think it is worth approaching this chunky 576 page novel with managed expectations – particularly so international readers who like me are less likely to be beguiled by this tale’s anthemic strains of Americana.

Now, I was always going to finish reading The Lincoln Highway because Towles hooks you early on setting off a domino-like series of events with menacing portent. But my expectation that this novel only spanning 10-days in the life of its characters would translate to a fast-paced reading experience was misguided.

Alternating perspectives

The Lincoln Highway narrative is told from alternating character perspectives – a literary construct I typically really enjoy. But I found Towles’ decision to use third-person perspective for some characters and first-person for others perplexing to say the least. I suspect it was something to do with ‘reading about heroes’ and a desire to heighten narrative suspense. But this, the numerous side tales and at times laboured moral messaging broke my reading spell on many occasions.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

I would describe The Lincoln Highway ‘s conclusion as thought-provoking and worthy of interrogation, rather than satisfying. I am a big believer in karma, but this brand of casual fatalism and eye-for-an-eye dogma was just a little hard for me to swallow.

In The Lincoln Highway Amor Towles once again delivers characters that charm. That is his enviable talent. But, whether readers are ‘swept away’ by their story, I think rests heavily on personal experience and philosophical outlook.

BOOK RATING: The Story 3.5 / 5 ; The Writing 4 / 5 – Overall 3.75

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More The Lincoln Highway reviews

‘ The Lincoln Highway  is a joyride… delightful tour de force .. There’s so much to enjoy in this generous novel packed with fantastic characters’ – NPR.org

‘Towles’ third novel is even more entertaining than his much-acclaimed  A Gentleman in Moscow  (2016)… A remarkable blend of sweetness and doom, Towles’ novel is packed with revelations about the American myth, the art of storytelling, and the unrelenting pull of history. An exhilarating ride through Americana.’ – Kirkus Starred Review

‘With its down-home style and ideas about the lone hero, The Lincoln Highway is pure Americana. Reading it in any other country is like taking a vacation in the Land of the Free: a long, easy, enjoyable if at times hokey ride on a highway filled with adventure.’ – The Guardian

About the Author, Amor Towles

Amor Towles was born and raised in the Boston area. He graduated from Yale University and received an MA in English from Stanford University. An investment professional for over twenty years, he now devotes himself full time to writing. Towles lives in Manhattan with his wife and two children. Check out his website or connect with him on Twitter .

* My receipt of a review copy from the publisher did not impact the expression of my honest opinions above.

A booklover with diverse reading interests, who has been reviewing books and sharing her views and opinions on this website and others since 2009.

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Book review: A long and winding tale of life-changing adventures

"The Lincoln Highway"

Author: Amor Towles

Viking, 588 pages, $30

“The Lincoln Highway” is the latest book from award-winning author Amor Towles. This book is unusual in several respects: its length, its format — with multiple points of view/narrators — and its unconventional punctuation. I admit I didn’t dive into the book with lightning speed. Like a fine wine, it needed to breathe a bit in my consciousness.

As the book evolved, I became more and more engaged by the characters’ present experiences and their diverse, life-shaping backstories. Towles’ narrative and prose at first appeared simple. But as the story unfolded, I was intrigued by its unexpected depths and undercurrents. The author’s master hand at work.

The core storyline revolves around three young men who meet in and depart from a juvenile detention facility: Emmett Watson, “Duchess” Hewett and Wooly Martin. The other main character, and travel companion, is Billy, Watson’s highly precocious 8-year-old-brother. “The Lincoln Highway” is a road-trip-buddy book with a myriad of mixed agendas and detours.

The action (and there’s a lot of it) unfolds over a 10-day period, starting in Nebraska and ending in New York state with chunks of it occurring along the eponymous transcontinental Lincoln Highway. Along this journey the group of four split up and reshape much like an amoeba. During periods where the group is in some fashion divided (by the most inventive of circumstances), a cast of supporting characters arrive onstage. Conscious of spoilers and with too many to name, I’ll mention my two favorite supporting characters: a riding-the-rails man named Ulysses and one Professor Abernathe, the author of the “Compendium of Heroes, Adventurers and Other Intrepid Travelers.”

Much like his Greek mythological namesake, Ulysses performs an act of heroism (in a boxcar) and has been wandering for 10 years, yearning for his wife and child. His encounter with Billy is transformative. It leaves him, and the reader, with hope for a long-sought reunion.

The professor is introduced at the start of the story with young Billy obsessively reading from his red-leathered tome to himself and others. Billy’s serendipitous New York City encounter with his beloved author helps the boy fulfill his dreams and has a life-changing impact on the author, too.

In summary, “The Lincoln Highway” follows a long and winding road rife with numerous off and on ramps. The book reads a bit more like 19th or early 20th century literature with more pages to the payoff, but I found the prose, important themes, compelling characters and twists-you-never-saw-coming well worth the investment of time and thought.

Jacksonville author Claudia N. Oltean is currently completing a two-book historical fiction series set during Prohibition/The Roaring ’20s.

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Book review: Amor Towles' novel, 'The Lincoln Highway' takes readers on a surprising journey

For fans of “A Gentleman in Moscow” and “Rules of Civility,” the great news this fall is that Amor Towles has a new book. This one is completely different and yet just as compelling as the previous two. 

In “The Lincoln Highway” Towles follows three teenage boys and an 8-year-old as they travel along the Lincoln Highway from Morgen, Nebraska, to Manhattan in 1954.

Emmett Watson, just released from a juvenile boys detention camp, has returned to Nebraska to find that his family’s farm has been foreclosed on. His father has died and his mother long-ago abandoned the family. Billy, Emmett’s little brother who was an infant when their mother left, has decided they should follow her trail of postcards and try to find her in San Francisco.

As the boys are about to depart in the only possession Emmett has left — a powder-blue Studebaker — who should show up but Duchess and Woolly, escapees from the same juvenile camp from which Emmett was released.

Through trickery, Duchess commandeers the road trip and sends it on an alternate eastern course (though still on the Lincoln Highway) to New York where Woolly can claim his trust fund and make the quartet of boys — called the Four Musketeers to Billy’s delight — rich. 

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The story unfolds over a mere 10 days. Duchess, accompanied by the sweet, unworldly Woolly, hijacks the Studebaker, leaving Emmett and Billy no recourse but to ride the rails to track them down and secure the car. 

Along the way, they all meet a variety of characters — some of them very Mark-Twain-like: the sinister, self-styled preacher Pastor John; a third-rate vaudeville performer named Fitzy FitzWilliams; Charity, Ma Belle and other ladies of a seedy brothel; and a noble Black World War II veteran named Ulysses.

Billy is particularly enamored of this last character because in his backpack, Billy carries a beloved book: “Professor Abacus Abernathe’s Compendium of Heroes, Adventures, and Other Intrepid Travelers” that tells the stories of among others, King Arthur, Robin Hood, Hercules and Ulysses. 

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Towles is a consummate storyteller, departing often but briefly from the road trip to deliver tales of his numerous other characters. Because Emmett, Duchess and Woolly had been together in the juvenile camp before the novel begins, there are plenty of stories from their time there as well as each of their family histories. 

Each main character is unique. Emmett is determined, stalwart, reserved. Billy is precocious but naive. Woolly, the failed son of a wealthy and aristocratic New York family, is otherworldly but kind. Duchess is the most complicated of the bunch: he’s charismatic, selfish, tricky and the engine that drives the tumult. A friend of Emmett’s from the detention camp describes him as a “loyal friend in his own crazy way,” an entertaining (expletive) slinger, a “guy born with no peripheral vision.”

The dupery of Duchess drives “The Lincoln Highway” to surprises along the way and to the stunner of the book’s finale.

Towles’ new novel is a rollicking, propulsive and alternately humorous and heartbreaking adventure filled with indelible, haunting characters. 

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The Lincoln Highway Book Review: Is Amor Towles’s new book worth a read?

November 15, 2021

The Lincoln Highway was one of my most anticipated releases of 2021 (along with Klara and the Sun and Cloud Cuckoo Land ). When my signed copy from Booka Bookshop arrived, you can bet I abandoned all other books to read this.

The book follows multiple perspectives with the main two being those of Emmett and Duchess. They’re both recently out of a youth facility in Kansas where they served time for different things. Emmett gets out a little early due to his father’s passing, whereas Duchess is trying to be the hero who saves Wooly (another boy from the facility). Emmett kind of goes with the flow, but the reader knows Duchess must have an ulterior motive. The trio picks up Emmett’s young brother from Nebraska and takes The Lincoln Highway to another state. Emmett and Billy aim to head to California, Duchess and Wooly to New York and they only have one car.

Where will they end up going?

Billy is a precious kid, but I did struggle with his character a bit. How is an 8-year-old so smart, so all-knowing in history and all sorts of things at such at that age? A lot of the time, he seems smarter than all the adults around him combined. A good way into the book I decided to suspend my disbelief in Billy and admire him for following the guidance of his beloved red adventure book. Any bookworm will appreciate Billy’s love of that book! I will say though that I’d have expected to see a bit of grief on his father’s passing and leaving the family home behind no matter how exciting the upcoming adventure is, or, am I expecting too much from him?

Where’s Billy and Emmett’s mother was another pressing question that went largely unanswered.

Sally is the only female character (Wooly’s sister only makes a brief appearance). Whilst I did like her a lot, it felt like she was there because someone needs to watch over Billy or keep Emmett out of trouble. I’d have loved to get to know her a bit better as she does have the potential to be a fascinating character.

The edition I read includes a Q&A with the author. Now, this is something I’d usually skip altogether or just skim through, but I’m glad I read it on this occasion as Towles explains coming up with the idea as a complete opposite to his other books, Rules of Civility and A Gentleman in Moscow . There’s an extensive explanation on the story taking place over 10 days in 1954 America (there’s a nice countdown even), an America out of one war and preparing for another. The writing is great indeed as I felt like I was there. Consider me successfully transported back in time by way of Amor’s words. I’m excited at the mention of him working on something very different next, I’ll pre-order it as soon as that’s available.

Overall, this book was a recipe for success as looking at books I’ve rated highly or loved recently, they’re all multiple POS with some historical or fantasy elements and interesting characters. As unlikely as I found some scenes (mostly Billy ones) the writing is so good (no surprise after loving Amor’s other books) that I have to rate this 5 stars. So many sticky tabs were used, you’ve got no idea.

If you’re into history, great characters and a journey through the USA, you may want to check this one out. It’s a long one, but a good one.

I’m not quite sure whether it’ll make it to my top 10 of 2021 yet, but it was definitely an amazing read.

Have you read this book, or, are you planning to read it? Let me know in the comments.

Tags: Amor Towles book review The Lincoln Highway

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The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

• Publication Date: March 21, 2023
• Genres: Fiction , Historical Fiction
• Paperback: 592 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• ISBN-10: 0735222363
• ISBN-13: 9780735222366
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Book review: difficult to believe characters weigh down amor towles’s enjoyable ‘the lincoln highway’.

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Girls  was a semi-popular HBO television production that aired from 2012-2017. To say that it was not for everyone is quite the understatement. The show could be very crude, and your religion didn’t have to lean Pentecostal for you to feel that way.

Just the same, the series was at times very well written and insightful. One episode toward the end of the show’s run had Marnie (one of the “Girls”) in a bad spot. As so many do in real life, she was looking to shift the blame for her declining situation to others only for a grizzled, one-time character to tell her something along the lines of “I’ve never seen anyone at the pawn shop because of what others did.”

The actual piece of televised dialogue was much better put. Once again, the writing on  Girls  was at times very good. The episode mentioned came to mind while reading  The Lincoln Highway , the latest novel by mega-bestselling author Amor Towles. What will be described as  Highway  going forward is Towles’s third book, after he garnered major popularity with his debut ( The Rules of Civility ), followed by  A Gentleman In Moscow . Both novels were good reads, with  A Gentleman In Moscow  spectacular (my review  here ).

Girls  came to mind while reading  Highway  because for a variety of reasons, three of the novel’s main characters (Emmett Watson, Duchess Hewett, and Woolly Martin) are in the proverbial pawn shop. The novel begins with the warden of a juvenile work camp in Salina, Kansas taking Emmett back to his family’s farm in Morgen, Nebraska. Emmet’s mother had left the family eight years prior, and his father’s untimely death from cancer secured Emmett an early release. He returns to his father’s foreclosed on farm (Mr. Watson “didn’t know what he was doing”), along with an inquisitive, abnormally smart eight-year-old brother named Billy.

Emmett’s plan is to pack Billy and very few belongings into a Studebaker he’d purchased with the proceeds from his work as a carpenter’s apprentice before Salina. He also has $3,000 that his father secretly left him that will fund a move out of Morgen. He and Billy will go either to California or Texas in order to start a new life. Emmett will buy one house, rehab it only to sell it at a profit, then buy two houses with an eye on fixing both only to sell one while living in the other.

As Emmett’s neighbor Sally Ransom puts it about Emmett late in the novel, he acts like smiles are a “precious resource.” Emmett is a serious, moral person; albeit one with a past that’s not all of his own making. Indeed, he can’t realistically stay in Nebraska because of what brought him to Salina in the first place. Two years before, he turned around to punch a Morgen local who was taunting him endlessly about his failed father. The punch wasn’t a killer, but the freak way in which the punch’s recipient landed resulted in him dying, and the rather innocent and good Emmett being sent to Salina.

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Billy wants to move to California, and it’s his wish to follow their estranged mother’s presumed path on The Lincoln Highway. The latter is 3.390 miles long, and it’s the U.S.’s very first cross-country highway. It stretches from Times Square all the way to Lincoln Park in San Francisco. More on the Lincoln Highway in a bit, but Billy concludes that their mother took this route based on postcards she sent the kids after leaving, but that their father did not share with them while alive.

They’re all set to go, only for Duchess and Woolly to turn up. They were serving time at Salina with Emmett, and they’d climbed into Warden Williams’s trunk ahead of him driving Emmett home. Duchess and Woolly have other plans, plans that include bringing Emmett and Billy (the fourth musketeer as it were) east with them. Woolly comes from a prominent and well-to-do family, and there’s $150,000 in the safe at the family’s “camp” up in the Adirondacks. His and Duchess's intent is to get the money, divide it up, and then get on with their lives.

Emmett has no interest in what his former barrack mates have cooked up, but novels wouldn’t be novels if everything went as planned. Duchess ultimately “borrows” Emmett’s Studebaker, only for him and Woolly to head east. Emmett and Billy hop a train hobo style in order to get the car back, and thus begins a story that takes place over 10 adventure-filled days.

Back to  Girls  and the “pawn shop,” Towles writes Emmett, Duchess and Woolly as though their work-camp misfortune was all the doing of others. Such is the prerogative of fiction novelists, they get to shape the characters in the way they like, but his drawing of them deprived  Highway  of believability. Realistically there’s no story if Emmett’s a really bad person who had purposely killed someone, but seemingly no one in  Highway  is at fault at which point we should all be so lucky to be sent off to a work camp filled with such interesting, articulate, and (in Woolly’s case) well-bred inmates. Everyone in  Highway  is abnormally perceptive, well read, and talented, including those at Salina.

None of this is to say  Highway  isn’t an enjoyable story. It’s very enjoyable. In my case, I finished what is a 576 page book in a little over 48 hours despite much of those hours being occupied with unrelated work. The book is hard to put down. I can’t wait for Towles’s next, and would see the film-rendering of  Highway  on the first day of release. At the same time, there’s so much within the novel that reads as trite, out of place, and untrue. More on what bothered me later on.

For now, and as is the case with all of my reviews, I’d like to pivot to interesting economic angles within  Highway . There are many. What’s unknown is if this was the author’s intent. That Towles’s background is finance certainly makes it possible that he was making economic or political statements, but at the same time the book is neither outwardly economic nor political.

On to the economics.

As previously mentioned, Emmett returns from Salina to a farm that is being foreclosed on. He’s understandably terse with Tom Obermeyer, the banker overseeing the foreclosure. Obermeyer expresses great remorse, and makes plain that “no bank makes a loan in hopes of foreclosing.” No, they don’t. Precisely because bank loans don’t have an equity quotient, banks need them to  perform . Obermeyer’s line is a corrective of the laughable commentary from the Left back in 2008 that “predatory lenders” essentially forced money on unsuspecting borrowers with no means to pay monies borrowed back. The narrative always vandalized reason, but its ferocious stupidity continues to animate Lefty commentary. To this day they promote what defies common sense; that loan sources quite literally targeted those incapable of paying them back.

While Charles Watson was a failed farmer whose yearly harvests were routinely imperiled by the vagaries of nature, Emmett chose work in the town before Salina; figuratively very far from the farm. Having witnessed his father’s ineptitude that was exacerbated by nature, he chose carpentry work that “welcomed the extremes of nature.” While schizophrenic weather was the enemy of the farmer, and weather extremes potentially bankrupting, these “natural forces” were the friend of carpenters and builders because they “slowly but inevitably undermined the integrity of the house.” So true, but in reading this I found myself wondering what 19 th  century French political economist Fredric Bastiat would say about Emmett’s assessment. No doubt he would be clear that destructive weather extremes wouldn’t be good for the overall economy, but how would he assess what these extremes meant for the economics of carpenters? The bet here is that he would question Emmett’s logic. Think about it. Imagine if houses were so sturdy as to not have their integrity undermined by weather and use? If so, imagine all the wealth not consumed on repairs, and that would be directed toward investment. Realistically carpenters would have much more work building more houses to reflect demand for same that is always a consequence of production first.

Still, Emmett (and by extension Towles) isn’t totally bereft of Bastiat, or Adam Smith. Smith observed in  The Wealth of Nations  that “the most decisive mark of prosperity of any country is the increase of the number of its inhabitants.” Emmett would agree. He ultimately concludes that he and Billy should move to California after comparing population increases from the 1920s to 1960s in Texas and California. Though Texas presently outpaces California in population growth (the statistics can be misleading, but that’s another column), the Golden State was well outpacing the Lone Star state in the first half of the 20 th  century. Seeing this at a library in Morgen, Emmett properly deduced that more people would mean more demand for the houses that he intended to rehab with an eye on selling. California it would be.

How was the Lincoln Highway initially constructed? This bit of history is eye-opening, and highly relevant in an economic sense. It is because those of us who claim a libertarian bent have long made the point that assuming a lack of massive federal highway spending, highways would still be all over the United States. They would be because businesses desire expansive market access, people treasure easy access to other people, and roadbuilders would logically exist to meet these needs. Absent the federal government, the profit motivations or private motivations to build that which connects us would still be great. And so they are. Or were. Applied to the Lincoln Highway, Towles writes that Carl G. Fisher “built the first sections in 1913 with the help of donations” from prosperous individuals like Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Edison. In other words, we could drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco on roads with or without federal spending. The major difference is that private highways would be much better, and much less choked by traffic, precisely because price signals would inform usage.

When Duchess and Woolly ultimately “borrowed” Emmett’s car, they soon found that they had lost the signal to Emmett’s favorite radio station “somewhere back in Nebraska.” When Woolly turned on the radio with an eye on hearing the ads that endlessly entertained him, “all that came through the speaker was static.” Readers of this review will perhaps call this a reach, but call the static Duchess and Woolly endured a metaphor for the genius of inequality. As opposed to a pejorative, it’s actually a very bullish sign that wildly skilled entrepreneurs are able to meet the needs of more and more people. Were Duchess and Woolly on the road now, they could gain easy access to hundreds of stations without regard to location thanks to Sirius/XM. Barring that, through their internet enabled smartphones they could access the  world’s  radio stations for nothing. Soaring wealth inequality is a feature of a free society, not a bug.

About the ads that Woolly can’t get enough of, Duchess described them as pitches from businesses promising consumers that their products would remove “the lumps from their life.” Yes. Ludwig von Mises always described the rich as individuals whose commercial advances had removed “unease” from the lives of others. The criticism of inequality by both major ideologies is surely beneath both.

Duchess asks why people “born with money are always the ones who say the word like it’s in a foreign language?” His point was that those born with it in his experience are often the least likely to open their wallets when bills come. What a question? The likely answer is that what’s true today has always been true: parsimony is the surest path to wealth. Those born with money are perhaps loathe to spend it because it’s inborn? They descend from people whose own thrift made it possible for wealth to be passed on. Lest we forget, the histories of the greatest businesses that generated the greatest fortunes are usually defined by countless near-death experiences. By extension, business founders almost as a rule have to be very careful with money. It’s not unrealistic that their heirs are too. Good. Savings are what drive economic progress despite what credentialed economists believe. Entrepreneurs require unspent wealth to prosper. Adam Smith called savers “public benefactors” with good reason.

To ready Woolly in  Highway  is for Lennie in John Steinbeck’s  Of Mice and Men  to come to mind. Lennie wants George to tell him about living off “the fat of the land” out west, while Woolly wants the streetwise Duchess to tell him about Leonello’s, the Manhattan-based Italian restaurant that doesn’t take reservations. It thrives because it doesn’t. As Duchess explains it, “You open a place that no one can get into, and everybody wants to be there.” There’s a genius to scarcity in the economic space, but like charm it’s in a sense elusive.

Duchess’s absentee father is a boozy, spottily employed actor in the mold of John Barrymore whose best friend is Fitzy FitzWilliam. FitzWilliam had at one time lived on 5 th  Avenue thanks to the willingness of people in Manhattan with “van” in their name to pay any amount in order to secure his services as Santa Claus during the Christmas season. But then one night the “shapely daughter of an industrialist” asked him to impersonate Karl Marx at a gathering put on by the Greenwich Village Progressive Society. A police raid of the gathering led to NYC’s #1 Santa being exposed as a Marx imitator (the actor in FitzWilliam couldn’t resist....acting) only for his career as the city’s highest paid Santa to end. This rates mention as a way of wondering: is Towles making a comment on the abject, frequently left-wing stupidity exhibited by the children of the actual wealth creators, or did the “shapely daughter of an industrialist” who’d gone socialist given him the story he needed to bring FitzWilliam into the failed orbit of Duchess’s father?

The guess here about the above question is that Towles is telling a story as opposed to being political or economic, but it’s always fun to wonder. Twenty pages later, Towles explains has-beens through Duchess talking about FitzWilliam. “When it comes to waiting, has-beens have had plenty of practice.” On the same page, there’s “that’s what has-beens do: They wait.” From this some could conclude that Towles is making a bigger point about people being the authors of their misfortune by waiting for good things to happen as opposed to  doing . It’s certainly possible, but then as has already been written at length, to varying degrees Towles draws Emmett, Duchess, and Woolly as victims of simple bad luck.

There’s a very uplifting story of a black man by the name of Ulysses who saves Billy from being robbed (and arguably worse) in a box car on the train ride to New York. Ulysses is a symbol of something much bigger as readers of  Highway  will see, but for the purposes of this review he asserts that “everything of value in this life must be earned.” So true, but also wording that conservatives would in particular cheer. Is Towles political? The bet here yet again is no, but this doesn’t alter fact that there are economic and political truths uttered within  Highway . And the truths are good.  Highway  is a book I’ll be referencing for a long time.

Still, what bothered me while reading Highway, and what lingers after reading it, is that there was seemingly no one looking over Towles’s shoulder as “quality control” expert. Someone to question some of what jumped out to yours truly as “trite, out of place, and untrue.” The examples are many, and they weakened the book.

Trite utterances were everywhere. Warden Williams tells Emmett you have your “whole life ahead of you” more than once, neighboring farmer Ed Ransom has known Emmett “since the day he was born.” Emmett was made a “hearty breakfast,” and then the night before Emmett’s depressed mother left the family, the family actually had a wonderful time at a fireworks show in Seward, Nebraska. The story indicates that the good time had by their mother made her realize she could be happy again, but only if she left the failed existence created by her husband. Ok, it all makes sense, but in a paragraph about gag wording, we’re treated to how after they returned from a great time in Seward, Emmett “slept soundly as any night in his life.” Oh come on!

There were also words that read as very out of place, or not of 1954. One character says we must “break bread,” Jake Snyder (brother of the Jimmy Snyder who was inadvertently killed by Emmett) has “wingmen” with him when he settles a score with a back-from-Salina Emmett, “nutjob” comes up once, and then Ma Belle (head of a raffish circus lounge, and realistically a brothel), upon hearing that Woolly attended (and was kicked out of) prominent boarding schools of the St. Paul’s, St. Mark’s, and St. George’s variety, explains to one of the women in her employ that those are “WASP” schools; the problem there that WASP wasn’t yet part of the lexicon in 1954.

Speaking of Woolly, though well-bred, well-traveled, and shuttled between the Upper East Side and the family’s amazing Adirondack “camp” all of his life, Towles once again drew him as Lennie. We have him randomly taking the Studebaker to see a Lincoln monument during the trek to New York (at risk of arrest), we have him fascinated by Howard Johnson menus and simplistic ads, and of course we have him asking Duchess to tell him about Leonello’s. Woolly is written as well-meaning but hopelessly dense. Except for when Towles wanted him to not be.

Seemingly touched (slow maybe?) during some parts of the novel, and quite simply out there, at others he’s lucid and biting; telling sister Sarah that he and Duchess are back in New York “Gadding about, I suppose. Hither and yon.” About his mother’s remarriage to Richard after his father’s death, the supposedly vacant of mind Woolly has enough mind to acidly comment on their mother’s commitment to her first marriage as “till death do them part – but not for a minute longer.”

About Emmett’s own parents, Charles claims in a letter to Emmett offering apologies for how little he was leaving him that Watson men from Boston going back to his great grandfather had left their sons “Not simply stocks and bonds, but houses and paintings,” along with memberships “in clubs and societies.” Emmett’s mother was similarly of some kind of Beacon Hill, and possibly Brahmin stock? Emmett ultimately concludes that his father came from a family like Woolly’s. It didn’t ring true. No doubt George H.W. Bush went to Midland to seek his fortune or place, but oil was a lucrative business when he went against type and headed to Texas. Conversely, farming was an industry in desperate shape by the 1930s, and it had been made worse by an Agricultural Adjustment Act that presumed to regulate the industry in suffocating ways. Yet we’re supposed to believe Emmett’s parents chose Morgen? It was hard to take seriously, and no quotation from Emerson explaining Charles’s reasoning could normalize the decision.

Townhouse is a character who appears throughout  Highway  either in recollection form, or live. He factors prominently in the story, but that’s really not the point. The point here is that he’s the clear Alpha among some street toughs in Harlem, and this Alpha like New Yorkers Duchess and Woolly similarly found his way to Salina. And you guessed it, really through no fault of his own. Yet at one point in a discussion about Duchess with Emmett, Townhouse observes that he is “like one of those guys who are born with no peripheral vision.” A good description of Duchess for sure, but the words of someone who’d spent time at a juvenile work camp? Unlikely. It cannot be stressed enough that seemingly everyone from Salina in the novel is there because of something someone else did, and these same individuals all talk as though they sat alongside Woolly at St. Paul’s.

Which brings us to Duchess. It’s no fun criticizing the author’s drawing of a character that the author so clearly loved drawing. At the same time, Duchess was all over the map as a person. Out of the same mouth that utters “deign,” “electorate,” “visage to visage,” and “each one of us has come from disparate parts,” comes old-time street-isms like “right in the kisser,” along with an easy ability to beat people to the point hospitalization and death, an easy rapport with ladies of the night, and a streetwise nature that has little to do with words like “deign.” And oh yes, Duchess is also an incomparable cook capable of whipping up fettucine mia amore when not settling scores meant to balance debits and credits.

What does this all mean? It’s hard to say. Maybe Towles can’t write street, or maybe he’s just an optimist writing remarkable people as he wants to write them. It’s hard to say. I’ll choose to believe that Towles is an unrelenting optimist and that this shows through in some amazing characters. At the same time, these individuals were hard to take seriously.

Do the alleged demerits mentioned call for not reading the novel? Certainly not. As mentioned, I couldn’t put it down. Most chapters end with cliff hangers of sorts, which meant I kept turning the pages until work commitments forced me to stop reading. But only for a time.  Highway  is a very good read, but probably the best way to conclude is that  A Gentleman In Moscow  thoroughly knocked me over.  The Lincoln Highway  ultimately is weighed down by Towles’s own excellent past, as do characters drawn that, while interesting, were frequently hard to believe.

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Erica Manoz Blog

A personal lifestyle blog, the lincoln highway – book review.

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

Published: october 5th 2021, publisher: penguin, length: 17 hours, audiobook, genre: historical fiction, content warning: loss of a loved one, racism,.

Goodreads Synopsis.

In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the work farm where he has just served a year for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett’s intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother and head west where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden’s car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett’s future.

Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles’s third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes.

AMAZON | LIBRARIES | LIBBY

This was one of my book club picks back in March of this year. I had started the audiobook and did not finish in time for book club. I have to say I was at once impressed by the main narrator, Edoardo Ballerini. I didn’t pick it back up until earlier this month and when I did, I found that I retained from memory what I had read and where I left off. I owe that to Mr. Ballerini.

The author’s excellent writing ignited my imagination into these characters’ journeys. It also brought the 1950’s Americana setting to life throughout the book. I felt pulled into this time period and into each situation presented to me. Each character has their own “coming of age” moments and the way it’s all seamlessly tied together is astounding. It made for a real enjoyable reading (listening) experience. I highly recommend this book and if you can, listen to the audiobook!

Happy Reading!

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