AMOR TOWLES The Lincoln Highway. Reviewed by CJ Pardey

This new novel from Amor Towles is a road trip across the United States of the 1950s.

It would be interesting to know how many members the Lincoln Highway Association has. Established in 1913, fading away in the 1940s and reactivated in 1992, the Lincoln Highway Association is dedicated to preserving and celebrating the United States’ first transcontinental road for cars, the Lincoln Highway. The success of Amor Towles’s novel The Lincoln Highway may just result in a record number of new members.

Amor Towles has a wonderful talent for writing reassuring words in troubled times. His novels are page-turners, but it is their moral backbone, personified in his male protagonists – in The Lincoln Highway, Emmett Watson; in his first novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, Count Alexander Rostov – that ensures we are left with not just an entertaining read but also the happy feeling that somewhere in the world there are people for whom, no matter how dark the times in which they live, or how bad the people they share them with, goodness will eventually win out.

American authors have made great mileage out of the road trip genre – Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, come to mind – but in a country whose persona is dominated by the frontier thesis, Americans have always been on the lookout for terrains to cross and journeys to make. The Lincoln Highway is an old-fashioned road trip, as well as an old-fashioned buddy story, where good people help each other.

Set in the early 1950s and encompassing the vast drama of the North American continent, the novel keeps its readers focused on the four main characters. The hero, 18-year-old Emmett, newly released from juvenile detention, is Nebraskan, and there is something of the qualities the wonderful Willa Cather gave to her settler heroes in Emmett; his honesty and moral integrity are never in doubt. The tension in the novel comes from our concerns for Emmett, and whether he and his eight-year old brother, Billy, will make it to San Francisco, where Emmett dreams of starting afresh. But before they set off in Emmett’s much-loved powder blue 1948 Studebaker Land Cruiser, Emmett’s plans are threatened by the unexpected appearance of two fellow inmates from juvenile detention, Duchess and Woolly. Duchess – Huckleberry Finn without the moral compass – has other ideas, and by using the poignantly tragic Woolly, he persuades Emmett that a small detour east instead of west on the Lincoln Highway, is necessary.

Unsurprisingly Towles has his characters ending up in his favourite city, New York, and the New York City of the early 1950s is richly and lovingly created. Arguably the 1950s were North America’s best decade of the twentieth century, before the war in Vietnam questioned American values, a time when life seemed relatively simple. Towles shows us, however, that on closer examination inherent flaws were always present that were to play out for the rest of the twentieth century and beyond.

As well as having four leading men, the secondary characters are also worth the many pages Towles allots to them. There is the wonderfully practical Sally, Emmett’s love interest:

– I do believe that the Good Lord has a mission for each and every one of us.

Or the tragic Ulysses, befriended by Emmett’s brother, the very innocent, Billy:

 – So, continued Ulysses, [carrying an inert body] I’m going to take him down the stairs and drop him –

 – At the police station?

 – That’s right, Billy.

These minor characters provide wonderful byways to wander down before Towles ups the drama and swings the plot back into action.

The plot of The Lincoln Highway is driven by the appearance of good, then evil, then good, something like an American two-step, but Towles ensures enough complexity to keep his readers guessing as to what will happen next. Nor are his characters simply black and white: the good are not so angelic they do not have foibles and flaws they must overcome, and the bad are not so evil they are not engaging or entertaining. The appeal of Duchess never wanes, and his last scene alone makes The Lincoln Highway worth reading. 

Amor Towles The Lincoln Highway Hutchinson 2021 592pp $32.99

CJ Pardey has reviewed for Rochford Street Review and The Beast.

You can buy The Lincoln Highway from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

Or check if this book is available from Newtown Library.

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Tags: 1950s America, American road novels, Amor | Towles, The Lincoln Highway