The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles
on October 5, 2021
Genres: Fiction / Historical / General
Pages: 576
Format: Audiobook
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In June 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett’s intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California, where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden’s car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett’s future, one that will take them all on a fateful journey in the opposite direction—to the city of New York. Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles’s third novel will satisfy fans of his multilayered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes.
I hate to say it, but this book confused me. I thought Emmett was our protagonist, and I was all ready to cheer him on as he did whatever he needed to do to start a new life, mainly by driving along the Lincoln Highway (hence the name of the book, right?). But this must be a case of mismatched expectations because Emmett wasn’t the actual focus of this book and he didn’t drive along that namesake road. Emmett is but one character out of many in this book, and he shares equal limelight with them all. Each of these characters has their points of view and ample time in the book, filled with their corresponding backgrounds and narratives. But the issue is that the tales of these side characters are not vital to the story. You can just cut out their turns and still have essentially the same story overall. So to include them made the whole thing feel bloated and unfocused.
I rated this novel 3.5 stars. That isn’t to say this was all bad. I still enjoyed Towles’s writing, even if I didn’t really connect with the story. Clearly Towles was paying homage to 1950s Americana, and he does well from the parts I could pick up. But in the end, I just wasn’t the right audience for this book, and I hope other readers trying this will have better luck than I did.
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