Earlier this year I finally got around to reading Amor Towles’s second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow. I don’t know why I put it off for so long. It’s an engaging story replete with memorable characters and events, but even more, it’s a profound look at life and what makes it worth living. Despite the constraint of setting nearly the entire novel within a single hotel, Towles managed to portray a life full of love and friendship, heartbreak and redemption. It’s a major work of art which I’d bet will be read for years to come.
As if in need of a much different challenge, Towles’s follow-up, The Lincoln Highway, is set across a very wide stage. The central characters cross the eastern half of the United States on the titular roadway and have expansive adventures wherever they go. And yet, for all the thrills and dangers they encounter, the book as a whole feels a lot less full of life.
When Emmett Watson is released from juvenile detention upon the death of his father, he intends to quickly wrap up affairs at the failed family farm and take off for California with his brother. Emmett could use a fresh start, since everyone in his small town knows how he caused another boy’s death after punching him. Emmett’s plans are upended when two of his fellow detainees show up at his door, having made their escape in the trunk of the warden’s car. Duchess, the theatrical-minded son of a vaudevillian drunkard, and Woolly, the oft-befuddled offspring of a fabulously wealthy family, have a different plan in mind for Emmett. They want his help in traveling to New York so Woolly can reclaim the $150,00 trust fund his brother-in-law is keeping away from him. Emmett wants no part of this plan, but after wily Duchess engineers a trick which strands Emmett and Billy with no car and no money, they’re forced to follow Duchess and Woolly to New York.
Towles switches perspective frequently. Duchess’s chapters are in first-person, giving the reader a closer look at his oddly charming loquaciousness and his cracked moral compass. Woolly mostly worries about his inability to understand the things that the rest of his family and the rest of the world seem to pick up so easily. Emmett and Billy’s chapters are more straightforward, while other characters are occasionally heard from as well, like Emmett’s practical but stern neighbor Sally, and some stragglers the main characters meet along the way.
Though I flew through the novel due to Towles’s remarkable gift for lucid, readable prose, I did so with a sense of foreboding. Too many of the setbacks and misfortunes encounter by Emmett and the others felt like the result of authorial contrivances and out-of-character behavior. The plot progresses in checklist fashion, as if following a prescribed recipe. There is also the problem of Duchess, a character who is meant, I think, to be roguish and entertaining but comes off more like a guy you’d really like to punch in the nose. Duchess is a lot to take, and though Towles makes attempts to round out his character and lead the reader to understand and even sympathize with him, he might have set himself too large a task in that regard.
As the cast of characters finally converge in New York there are the expected revelations. Scores are settled and resolution ensues. Unfortunately, Towles falters at the ending, which left an extremely sour taste in my mouth. Ultimately, this rather long novel doesn’t amount to much. Whereas A Gentleman in Moscow felt like a book that was written because the author had something to say, The Lincoln Highway feels like a book that was written because the author wanted to write a book.