THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY – AMOR TOWLES – REVIEW

This review contains light spoilers for The Lincoln Highway and A Gentleman in Moscow.

3,389 miles of open road. That was the promise of America’s first transcontinental highway, which, in 1954, The Lincoln Highway’s protagonists plan to use to start a new life.

Perhaps surprisingly then, we do not spend too many pages on the road itself. Instead, it provides a backdrop for Towles’ trademark detours and deviations. By the end of the novel, it feels as if we have spent more more time in suburban homes, the Empire State Building, and even on trains than on the Lincoln Highway itself. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. If Towles could make 22 years in a Moscow Hotel feel like a wide, wild world, then of course he can make ten days on a straight road feel distinctly higgledy piggledy.

One of the striking things about this novel, like Towles’ previous work, is how deeply the author thinks about his themes and motifs. A highlight, particularly in the first half of the book, is a focus on monotony, and the tyranny of “every-day days”. Given that many of our characters have been released or escaped from the drudgery of a work farm, it is a clever choice, but more traditional cages are also exposed. Sally laments the dullness of a domestic life of cleaning and jam making. Was Billy’s father’s existence, trying in vain to sustain a farm that could not feed him, all that different from his son’s life of prison labour? At the same time, is it that different from the monotony of Woolly’s family’s privileged life, of traditions repeated every year, of houses opened and closed depending on the season?

The key, Emmett’s father believed, was to do something different, to make a break from the past. That is what Emmett determines to do too, upping sticks in search of a future without baggage. However, as he will soon discover, it is not possible to live a life without obligations, and while those bonds may complicate our lives they might also be the things that give them meaning.

Naturally then, while Emmett tries to cut out his past, embarking on an obligation free journey to a new life in California, he cannot stop making promises. What should have been a simple journey west becomes, through his actions, and even more through those of others, including two stowaways from the work farm, a more convoluted one east. So begins a journey, accompanied by a rainbow cast of characters – hobos and homemakers, preachers and professors, conjurers and courtesans – towards a pot of gold that may or may not exist.

In medias res is another feature. Emmett’s brother, Billy, a wonderful study in precocious earnestness, is armed with a book of adventures, from the Odyssey to the modern day. Each story in Billy’s book begins, like the old tale of Achilles’ rage, in the middle of things.

In The Lincoln Highway, Towles practices what Billy’s book preaches. We begin with 18 year-old Emmett’s release from a juvenile correctional facility rather than his crime. Even more unmissably, we begin in medias highway, in rural Nebraska at the very centre of the road that gives the book its title.

As the novel progresses, the characters’ backstories are slowly filled in, letting us see the seeds of their flaws as well as their impacts on the present.

There is nobody here who has the range of talents as A Gentleman in Moscow’s Count Rostov. Billy’s boundless knowledge of trivia comes closest, while Duchess will, in time, showcase some unknown talents, including a mastery of Italian cuisine. But, much more than those gifts, right up to its final scene The Lincoln Highway is more about skills people lack and traits that do not come naturally, and the trouble they get into as a result.

It is far from the only contrast with AGIM, which is, at risk of doing it a great disservice by oversimplifying, a story about how a multi-talented aristocrat escapes the seemingly inescapable. Towles has written about how he likes to do something completely different in each book, and here he delivers on that promise. The action takes place over ten days rather than 22 years. Towles also plays with different perspectives. Duchess’ story unravels in the first person, Emmett, Wooly, and others in distinctive third person prose. It could be a risky move, lending a more personal feel to Duchess’s sections than to the more plainly ‘good’ Emmett, but Towles has of course judged it perfectly. Rather than making us feel more connected to Duchess than Emmett, the device serves to show off the former’s endearing but damaging selfishness.

It may be very different from Towles’ 2017 smash hit, but it is, in its own way, just as enchanting. Erudite but accessible, precise but expansive, this is a very Towles novel. It may slowly but surely count down towards a dramatic and poignant conclusion, but much more, this is a book about the journey rather than the destination. The trick, we are reminded, doesn’t work without the setup. As that journey progresses, it displays again and again the author’s exceptional talent for melding a charming lightness of tone with profound insights into life and the people who live it.