The Lincoln Highway
By Amor Towles
- Genre
- Literary Fiction
- Publisher
- Viking
- Publication year
- 2021
- ISBN
- 9780735222359
The Lincoln Highway follows eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson, newly released from a work farm in 1954, who plans to drive west with his young brother to start over. Two escapees from the same farm divert them on a ten-day journey east toward New York instead. Amor Towles's novel unfolds through...
In the summer of 1954, a young man walks out of a work farm intending to start over; within a day, two stowaways have redirected his plans toward New York. From that swerve Amor Towles builds a picaresque of unusual warmth, handing the narration to a rotating cast whose voices - earnest, scheming, wounded, grandiose - give the book its buoyancy. The Lincoln Highway is a road novel that runs, cannily, in the wrong direction, and Towles uses the reversal to meditate on debts, detours and the American faith in reinvention. Beneath the momentum runs a well-read intelligence, with nods to classical journeys and boyhood adventure stories worn lightly enough never to slow the ride. Readers who prize character and craftsmanship will find a novel engineered for pleasure yet serious about consequence. It is generous, propulsive and finally quite moving about the distance between the stories we tell ourselves and the roads we actually travel.