Towles takes readers on amazing journey in ‘The Lincoln Highway’
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-yearold 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.
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, selfstyled preacher Pastor John; a thirdrate 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.
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.
negilson@gmail.com