THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY

I recently finished reading The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles. I very much enjoyed Towles’ two previous novels – The Rules of Civility and A Gentleman in Moscow, so I was eager to read this one and I was not disappointed.

From The Odyssey onward, plenty of great stories are about trips or quests and this is one. NPR calls it the new Great American Road Novel and it fits that description. The premise is straight-forward. Upon the death of his father from cancer, 18-year-old Emmett Watson is released early from a juvenile work farm in Kansas and driven home by a kind warden to a small town in Nebraska, where he is reunited with his precocious 8-year-old brother, Billy. Facing foreclosure on the family farm and violent retribution from the family of the bully he accidentally killed at the fairgrounds, Emmett has an immediate and stark choice — should he stay or should he go?

Trained as a carpenter, he looks for a place with a growing population where he can use his skills to buy houses, fix them up and sell them. He settles on California because, besides the attraction of the growing population and wealth, it’s where is mother, who deserted the family when he was a child, lives. He’s take his eight-year old brother, Billy, with him and drive across the Lincoln Highway to San Francisco.

Young Billy, eager to traverse his mother’s path, proves to be a worthy sidekick for this all-American journey. He wears a watch with a second hand and carries in his Army surplus backpack a flashlight, a compass and a folded road map, along with his mother’s postcards and a well-thumbed compendium of adventure stories featuring 26 heroes, from Achilles to Zorro. From the cherished book, he knows the tropes of the travel tale, the requirements of heroes. California, here we come.

It’s classic misdirection as neither of them set even one foot westward. They set off on a different quest. 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.) a couple of stowaways, They were Emmett’s former bunkmates at the work farm, in the trunk of the kind warden’s car. “Ta-da!” says one, Duchess, the resourceful son of a vaudevillian, as Emmett discovers him in the barn. Duchess is a persuasive and original figure, an avenging moral accountant with a ledger of debts to collect.

Woolly, the other stowaway, is a sweet, stunted, “medicine”-addicted naïf from a wealthy Northeastern family. Woolly has been deemed unfit to receive a large family trust, and Duchess and Woolly have in mind an “escapade” to the Adirondacks to retrieve the money from the wall safe of a family home.

Emmet agrees to drive the fugitives as far as Omaha so that they can catch a bus to New York. While in Omaha, Duchess, the novel’s primary agent of chaos and digression, requests a short detour to an orphanage where he used to live. After he breaks in through a window to deliver strawberry preserves to the orphans, he steals Emmett’s Studebaker and, with Woolly, commences escapade.

Emmet and Billy give chase, stealing a ride on a freight train and Towles goes all in on the kind of episodic, exuberant narrative haywire found in myth or Homeric epic. There are all sorts of diversions and roadblocks and interesting characters, including one named ‘Ulysses’. It’s a rambunctious, wild novel full of digressions, magic tricks, sorry sagas, retributions, and the messy business of balancing accounts.

Like Towles’ other novels, The Lincoln Highway is not short and you might wonder what the plot is, but, as one of the characters points out: “How easily we forget — we in the business of storytelling — that life was the point all along,” Go and read this book, it’s a wonderful story full of people and life.