Cultural Dessert

'The Lincoln Highway' by Amor Towles

11 February 2022

The Lincoln Highway was the first transcontinental road across America, running from Times Square in New York City to Lincoln Park in San Francisco. In Amor Towles’ new novel, ‘The Lincoln Highway’, 18-year-old Emmett Watson, who has just been released from prison in 1954, plans a road trip with his 10-year-old brother Billy to start a new life in California - but things don’t go as planned. Like many epic heroic tales, ‘The Lincoln Highway’ starts its narrative ‘in media res’ - in the middle of the plot, but also in the middle of the Highway in rural Nebraska halfway between New York and San Francisco, because Amor Towles is not just telling us a story but telling us about story-telling. His previous novel ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ (reviewed here in September 2021) was my Pick of the Year: it is a remarkable book - charming, moving, clever and witty. ‘The Lincoln Highway’, which I have just finished reading as an unabridged audio book, narrated by Eduardo Ballerini, Marin Ireland and Dion Graham, is a very different story but has a similar feel. The characters are wise but not always clever, naive but unexpectedly articulate, and sympathetic despite the mistakes they make and the crimes they commit. There is a folksiness to the writing that brings a flavour of Mark Twain to mid-century middle America while also nodding to the novels of John Steinbeck. But there is also an underlying parallel with the Greek heroic epics that reminded me of the Coen Brothers film ‘O Brother Where Art Thou?’ (which is based on ‘The Odyssey’ by Homer). ‘The Lincoln Highway’ alternates the narrative point of view between each of the main characters, often overlapping different views of the same scene. This allows Towles constantly to undercut our expectations and keep us guessing with small plot twists in almost every chapter. And there is a satisfyingly meticulous attention to detail, with every action having some consequence, even if it comes much later in the story. ‘The Lincoln Highway’ is a delicious novel, incredibly likeable, surprising and loveable - I was torn between racing through the book to find out what happened, and not wanting it to end. I absotively loved it.

Labels: Books

posted by Robin Simpson @ 3:59 pm