The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles (Viking)

By Charlie Gofen

Eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson, just released from a juvenile work farm where he served 15 months for involuntary manslaughter, doesn’t have much to come home to. His mother abandoned the family years ago, his father recently died, and the bank is foreclosing on their farm. What’s more, the relatives and friends of the boy whom Emmett had punched and accidentally killed (after being provoked) are out for revenge.

Emmett hopes to head with his 8-year-old brother, Billy, from their home in Nebraska to a new life in California, but, as they say, fate has other plans for him. When the warden drives Emmett home, two friends from the work farm hide in the trunk of the warden’s car and show up at Emmett’s door to take him on an adventure in the opposite direction, to New York City.

Amor Towles’ The Lincoln Highway is part road novel and part Homeric epic, and it’s a magical piece of masterly storytelling. The entire novel takes place over just 10 days in June of 1954, but they are a busy 10 days for Emmett, Billy, and the two colorful escapees, Duchess and Woolly.

Towles commented recently that his favorite novels to read are “well written, rich and multilayered,” and The Lincoln Highway, like his superb two previous novels, Rules of Civility and A Gentleman in Moscow, fits the description nicely. Each of the major characters has a complex backstory, unique motivations, and his own interpretation of honor, justice, what is owed to us, and what, in turn, we owe to others. (The theme of moral accounting—performing acts of penance and “settling accounts” to balance the scales of justice—runs through the novel.)

The manipulative Duchess steers the youths toward New York to settle some personal scores and to help his gentle friend Woolly get his hands on a sizable inheritance locked in a safe at a family home in the Adirondacks. At one point, Emmett and Billy are forced to travel by freight train after Duchess and Woolly take off with Emmett’s prized 1948 Studebaker Land Cruiser. (The car has a fairly adventurous 10 days of its own, as it is nearly taken by a banker at the outset of the novel to settle Emmett’s father’s debts and then later is stolen/borrowed, gifted, re-gifted, and finally painted a new color to avoid detection by police.)

Meanwhile, traveling across the country in a boxcar, Emmett and Billy have some extraordinary adventures of their own, encountering an evil preacher and a good but sad man named Ulysses who has spent nearly a decade riding the trains alone, heartbroken because his wife and son left him after he went to fight in World War II.

One of the conceits of The Lincoln Highway is a fictional book-within-a-book that the precocious Billy has read dozens of times and carries with him on the journey to New York City. The big red book, titled Professor Abacus Abernathe’s Compendium of Heroes, Adventurers, and Other Intrepid Travelers, includes 26 alphabetical chapters beginning with Achilles, Boone, Caesar, Dantes, and Edison. Billy’s obsession with this book and its heroes allows Towles to provide echoes of the Odyssey, The Count of Monte Cristo, Jason and the Argonauts, and many other legendary tales throughout the novel.

The book-within-a-book trope is not uncommon—seen recently in Jean Hanff Korelitz’ The Plot and Stephen King’s Billy Summers—but it’s most fun when the author creates a fictional work like Professor Abernathe’s compendium that the characters in the novel know as an actual book and look to for wisdom. (I was reminded of Chad Harbach’s witty The Art of Fielding inside his 2011 novel of the same name.)

At one point, Emmett picks up Billy’s book and mulls over Professor Abernathe’s decision to mix great historical figures such as Galileo, da Vinci, and Edison with chapters about mythical heroes such as Hercules, Theseus, and Jason.

“By tossing them together, it seemed to Emmett, Abernathe was encouraging a boy to believe that the great scientific discoveries were not exactly real and the heroes of legend not exactly imagined. That shoulder to shoulder they traveled through the realm of the known and unknown making the most of their intelligence and courage, yes, but also of sorcery and enchantment and the occasional intervention of the gods.”

Towles himself mixes the real with the supernatural in The Lincoln Highway, giving the novel the feel of an epic quest. The serial stowaway Ulysses is a hero on a long journey, and, like his classical namesake, seems destined to be reunited with his family after a decade of wandering, if only he can believe in the possibility.

One of the many rewards of Towles’ novel is the way he weaves smaller stories into the larger tale. Emmett’s friend Duchess, son of an actor, proves the most compelling storyteller. Some of the little stories convey meaningful themes of compassion and redemption, but other stories are less poignant and serve more to just make the book a gratifying read. One of the best scenes comes in the story of Woolly’s accidentally setting the football field on fire when he was enrolled at St. Mark’s boarding school.

Woolly despised the thesaurus that his mother had given him—it “taunted, teased, and goaded” him with the “tens of thousands of words that could be substituted one for the other”—so he carried it down to the football field, doused it with gasoline, and set it on fire. Unfortunately, the flames triggered an explosion that set the entire goalpost on fire.

At Woolly’s disciplinary hearing, Woolly intended to explain that “all he had wanted was to free himself from the tyranny of the thesaurus,” but before he could speak, the Dean of Students announced that Woolly was there to answer for the “fire,” and a moment later, the faculty representative referred to it as a “blaze.” And then, “Dunkie Dunkle, the student council president (who also happened to be captain of the football team), referred to it as a `conflagration.’ And Woolly knew right then and there that no matter what he had to say, they were all going to take the side of the thesaurus.”

Like Odysseus on his decade-long journey home after the Trojan War, Towles’ characters encounter many surprises and obstacles along the way, but ultimately Towles makes the case that their fate is in their own hands (notwithstanding Emmett’s inability to head directly to California).

As Emmett’s childhood friend from Nebraska, Sally, notes, “I do believe that the Good Lord has a mission for each and every one of us—a mission that is forgiving of our weaknesses, tailored to our strengths, and designed with only us in mind. But maybe He doesn’t come knocking on our door and present it to us all frosted like a cake. Maybe, just maybe what He requires of us, what He expects of us, what He hopes for us is that—like His only-begotten Son—we will go out into the world and find it for ourselves.”

Perhaps we all have the capacity to be heroes, adventurers, and intrepid travelers.

Even the elderly Professor Abernathe, whom the boys meet in New York City and introduce to Ulysses, chooses to leave the safety of his office to join Ulysses on his quest. As Abernathe notes, “How easily we forget—we in the business of storytelling—that life was the point all along.”

Charlie Gofen is an investment counselor in Chicago who has taught high school and been a newspaper reporter.