The setting for this very new epic tale is the Lincoln Highway stretching from Times Square in NYC to Lincoln Square in San Francisco, in 1957. Emmett Watson, Wolly Wollcott, and Duchess FitzWilliams escape from a juvenile detention facility in Salina, Kansas to Morgen, Nebraska. Along with them in their escapades as they travel the Lincoln Highway to NYC is Emmet’s orphaned precocious eight year old brother, Billy. More than a dozen other mostly shady secondary characters that they encounter along the way complete the cast.
The ten chapters are numbered in reverse order and divided into sections that are narrated by, or in the third person tense about, the few main characters. The plot is full of surprises but intricately interconnected with impossible-to-predict twists. Towles takes full advantage of the old literary device of ending sections of narration with a quirky surprise mystery to be solved only many pages later. He deftly intertwines connections to a great variety of characters and stories many readers will be familiar with, including Ulysses, Achilles, Jason, Ishmael, Sinbad, Karl Marx, Walt Whitman, Shakespeare, and Zeno’s paradox as well as that of Schrodinger’s Cat. The introduction of these at times seem like artificial means for Towles to present his own unique insights and universal truisms about human existence and interactions. The description of means of travel, including hobos hitching rides on freight trains is detailed and realistic with vivid descriptions of the towns and cities that they pass through. The plot twists can be confusing unless the reader pays close attention to seemingly irrelevant details. I had to reread a section to figure out why Duchess tracks down Townhouse to deliberately take a beating to even the score between them. We never are told exactly why Wolly is taking some potent medicine nor the name of it. The few women characters play generally minor but certainly not subservient roles.
Most of the story is within the realm of possibilities although Billy’s profound insights and knowledge seem a bit excessive for an eight year old. And it does not seem likely that corn on the cob would be available to anyone, no matter how wealthy, to celebrate the July 4th holiday in the Adirondacks, in 1957. The result of the black ex-soldier turned hobo, Ulysses’s ten year quest to find his wife and son, and Emmett and Billy’s quest to find their estranged mother in San Francisco could not be fitted into the short time frame of the story, but could well have been added as a useful two-years-latter postscript.
One of many good quotes. “Emmett was raised to hold no man in distain. To hold a man in distain, his father would say, presumed that you knew so much about his lot, so much about his intentions, about his action both public and private, that you could judge his character against your own without fear misjudgement.”
A very different story than Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow, but equally entertaining, and far better in my opinion than his Rules of Civility.
Thanks
Din.
The Passionate Reader 