Review | The Lincoln Highway - treachery, tragedy, triumphs and epiphanies in teenagers’ nine-day odyssey across 1950s America
- Homeless and abandoned, teenager Emmett Watson has the weight of the world on his shoulders when he sets off for a new life along America’s Lincoln Highway
- With echoes of the Odyssey, Amor Towles makes him a Ulysses figure who challenges us to draw the line between myth and reality in a novel of timeless relevance
The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles, pub. Viking
Bestselling novelist Amor Towles creates plucky and likeable heroes who rise admirably above grim and complex circumstances. True to form, his third novel, The Lincoln Highway, begins with our hero, 18-year-old Emmett Watson, facing a heavy load of misfortune.
Emmett returns to his forlorn Nebraska home after serving a reformatory term for killing a man by accident. Emmett’s bankrupt father has just died after years of farming failure. His mother deserted the family years earlier. And the bank has foreclosed on the farm.
I did warn you: grim.
Homeless and parentless, Emmett points his old Studebaker towards the open road to build a new life for himself and his razor-sharp younger brother, Billy. Much of their nine-day adventure takes place on the eponymous Lincoln Highway, one of America’s oldest coast-to-coast routes.
In less confident hands, yet another hard-luck road story from America’s endless web of tarmac might quickly run into cliché territory. But Towles sidesteps that with skilful handling: his mythical allusions and epic parallels create a depth and sweep at odds with the story’s premise.
Although set in 1950s America, the novel is essentially timeless. It asks big questions about justice and retribution, the primal wounds of desertion by parents and spouses, the seminal role of storytellers, and probes the dimensions of our responsibility to others.
Towles, a former financier who lives in Boston, burst onto the literary scene in 2011 with his wildly successful debut novel Rules of Civility, which follows a witty and gritty heroine in 1930s Manhattan.
That was followed in 2016 by the charmingly creative bestseller A Gentleman in Moscow, in which a resourceful Count Rostov is condemned by communist authorities to live out his life in a Moscow hotel.
In The Lincoln Highway, Towles gives us a multilayered tale involving both a search for a missing mother and a quest to find a US$150,000 cash hoard. The plot is light and fast-moving, as three 18-year-olds and Billy, eight, speed their rapid way from Nebraska to New York by car and rail, racing against a looming deadline.
They meet with treachery, tragedy, triumphs and epiphanies, amid echoes of antiquity from Billy’s beloved book about a cast of heroes led by Homer’s Ulysses.
Emmett emerges as a struggling but honourable figure, rather like a Ulysses with a happy flair for one-liners. Asked in a job interview why he wants to be a carpenter instead of a farmer like his father, he replies: “The way I figure it, it was Job who had the oxen and Noah who had the hammer.” Ka-ching: he’s hired on the spot.
A here-and-now Ulysses challenges us to draw the line between myth and reality. The reader begins to wonder if Towles is retelling the Odyssey; in any case, we get good mileage out of Homer’s hero.
The complexity of Towles’ characters adds pace and interest. The rogue of the story, “the fast-talking, liberty-taking, plan-upending paradox known as Duchess”, is a self-serving enigma, warped by a brutal upbringing, and as charismatic as he is amoral.
Towles embraces the obscure mysteries that blend light and darkness in human nature: despite his wayward ways, Duchess actually strives to adopt Emmett’s effortless sense of honour. But his twisted nature distorts it into a pretext for meting out violent retribution.
By contrast, Emmett comes of age before our eyes, taming his dangerous temper, fine-tuning his moral compass and focusing his sense of fairness.
Emmett also learns to make room in his life for the loyal but irreverent Sally, who flashes through the story periodically like a comet of common sense. We quickly learn to cheer Sally’s recurring entrances and to mourn her exits from the story.
The novel’s perspective changes from one character to the next, giving extended sections in the naive voices of Billy and the mentally troubled Woolly. The device made this reader pine occasionally for the urbanity of Count Rostov. But although The Lincoln Highway may grip some readers less deeply than A Gentleman in Moscow, the variety of voicings proves convincing as the final pages turn rapidly.
The focus on responsibility and enduring truths makes The Lincoln Highway a timely tonic in our sad era of loony alternate realities and shameless self-interest.
Amor Towles’ event at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival takes place from 8:30pm-9:30pm on November 12 at J.C. Cube, in Tai Kwun, Central. Visit festival.org.hk for details.
