THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY
AMOR TOWLES
Hutchinson Heinemann, 576pp, £20
Amor Towles, whose 2016 novel A
Gentleman in Moscow was an international bestseller, has looked to the open road for his latest, a picaresque adventure set in the American Midwest. Carrie O'grady went along for the ride in the
Guardian: ‘Hundreds of miles roll by over the course of The Lincoln
Highway, a breezy Bildungsroman meets road trip that suits the Boston-born Towles's expansive, folksy, anecdotal style down to the ground.'
The novel begins in Kansas in 1954 with 18-year-old Emmett Watson and his younger brother Billy about to head off to California to look for their mother who has walked out on them eight years before. Patricia Nicol in the Sunday Times was disappointed: ‘It struggles to maintain drive or direction. Juggling classical and American mythologies, evoking westerns and Broadway capers, its story hares off in one direction then another, at times feeling less a road trip novel than
Wacky Races. At almost 600 pages, many readers may find it hard to stay this novel's bumpy, often misdirected course.' And Cal Reveley-calder in the
Sunday Telegraph agreed. ‘It bobs along as if aspiring to be a blockbuster road-movie script, but it's unforgivably light on tension and impetus.' And, oh dear, Barry Pierce in the Irish Times was similarly underwhelmed. ‘Those hoping for the classic road trip novel that the book's blurb, endpapers and cover promise it to be will be disappointed as Towles decides to ditch the intended plot for a laborious cat and mouse storyline that takes up the entire novel.'
Melissa Katsoulis in the Times, however, went against the grain and loved it. Though she conceded that it took a while to get into. ‘Before the grand finale there's a whole central casting waiting-room full of walk-on parts to contend with. We meet wise tramps and psychotic fake priests, eccentric professors and street-smart black kids, legless veterans and obliging farmer's wives, happy hookers and kindly nuns.'