"The Lincoln Highway" by Amor Towles

Amor Towles’ new book, The Lincoln Highway, is fun to read. I couldn’t put it down. It’s full of little gems and big themes. At the center is a road trip in a Studebaker in 1954. The novel is full of little details about maps and about driving on the Lincoln Highway, which was the first trans-continental US interstate highway. It’s full of stereotyped details about the 1950s, but they are charming details that add up to more than a bunch of trivia. Raiding Wikipedia and searching with Google, I’ve added a few photos of 1950s scenes that play a role in the vivid descriptions of the novel, which is mostly not illustrated, at least not in my Kindle version.

A Studebaker sedan, similar to the one in the novel.
These were very funny-looking cars, even for the 1950s.

One character, Emmett, starts out as a typical unlucky guy. Stuff happens to him because he is naive, and he’s way too trusting. But as he travels, he learns to watch out for himself. I think this is one of the most satisfying elements of the novel.

Train travel is also a part of the plot — riding for free in a boxcar. Or seeing what it’s like in a luxurious private Pullman car. Along the road, are Howard Johnson’s Restaurants. The free maps at the gas stations had a different level of detail than the maps on the place maps at Howard Johnson’s:

“We were sitting in a booth at the HoJo’s waiting for our breakfast. In front of each of us was a paper place mat that was also a simplified map of the state of Illinois showing major roads and towns along with some out-of-scale illustrations of regional landmarks. In addition, there were sixteen Howard Johnson’s, each with its little orange roof and little blue steeple.” (p. 179)

A roadside Howard Johnson’s: recognizable because of its blue steeple.
Its familiar orange booths are a comfort to Woolly, a troubled character.

Details about the road trip, like the distinction between a simple map and a gas station map, make for fun reading: 

“When a gas station map is handed to you, it’s almost the perfect size—like a playbill at the theater. But in order to read a gas station map, you have to unfold and unfold and unfold it until the Pacific Ocean is up against the gear shift and the Atlantic Ocean is lapping at the passenger-side door. Once a gas station map is open all the way, just the sight of it is likely to make you woozy, because it is positutely crisscrossed from top to bottom and side to side by highways and byways and a thousand little roads, each of which is marked with a tiny little name or tiny little number.” (p. 186)

The four main characters, of whom three are around 18 years old, each have a particular problem with their parents. They are all looking for their parents, living or dead, or trying to understand them. This sounds trite or corny but Amor Towles makes sure it is neither. The plot seems linear: they get in the car and drive towards New York on  the Lincoln Highway. The plot deviates as each one goes in search of what he needs to find. The details as they each experience New York City are also very enjoyable reading, especially as Towles creates a variety of levels of New York life from the richest homes to the poorest camps for homeless wanderers. And always a consciousness of how New York was the start of the Lincoln Highway.

"When I asked Woolly where we should meet,
naturally he suggested the statue of Abraham Lincoln
in Union Square." (p. 366).

Adventurers and travelers from the past play a role too, such as Ulysses and Greek myths. The youngest of the travelers, Emmett's little brother Billy, reads a book of stories about such adventurers, and he wonders whether there are such people still alive in the 1950s. The answer is yes, and a character named Ulysses puts in an appearance to prove it. (The character of Ulysses, a black man from St.Louis who rides the rails in a search for his lost wife, will probably be the subject of some critical analysis about how racial history is treated in current historical novels, but I'm not going to try to do this. I'm afraid he might be viewed as another version of  "The Magic Negro," a problematic literary type. See this review, for example.)

Big brother Emmett is always trying to understand how literature and imagination relates to life. He objects to Billy’s favorite book that mixes stories of real heroes (like Thomas Edison) with fictional or mythic ones (like Ulysses):

“Wasn’t it hard enough in the course of life to distinguish between fact and fancy, between what one witnessed and what one wanted? Wasn’t it the challenge of making this very distinction that had left their father, after twenty years of toil, bankrupt and bereft?” (p. 240)

The Lincoln Highway is about so many things, but they add up to one big thing: who you are, where you are going, and what that means. “After all, aren’t gluttony, sloth, and greed all about staying put? Don’t they amount to sitting deep in a chair where you can eat more, idle more, and want more? In a way, pride and envy are about staying put too.” (p. 463)

Book review © 2021 mae sander. 

Photos from random internet sites.