CBR16 BINGO: Détente, because Billy is always trying to keep the peace
Amor Towles is an undeniably talented writer. Having fallen in love with A Gentleman in Moscow and being charmed by Table for Two, I came to expect that I would adore just about anything he wrote. And certainly, there is a lot to like in The Lincoln Highway. At times I would be cruising along like the old Studebaker in the story when a particular turn of phrase or small vignette would stop me in my tracks and force me to go back and re-appreciate its beauty. In spite of this, the novel, as a whole, didn’t quite work for me.
In 1954, 18-year-old Emmett Watson returns home from a 15-month stint on a juvenile work farm, the result of an involuntary manslaughter conviction. His father having recently died leaving nothing but debt, and his mother having long-since abandoned Emmett and his young brother, Billy, Emmett decides to take his old Studebaker and the few thousand dollars that his father managed to leave him and set out for a new life. Billy, convinced that their mother went to San Francisco, convinces Emmett to take the Lincoln Highway (the first transcontinental highway in the United States) to California. Their plans are complicated by the appearance of two of Emmett’s “friends” from the work farm in Salina: Duchess, a sometimes charming rogue (read, sociopath) who has a very particular code of ethics when it comes to paying his debts; and Woolly, a privileged youth who never learned to grow up (at times I thought he was intellectually challenged, but by the end it appears he suffered from arrested development). What follows is a road trip that takes the group in the opposite direction, toward New York and the Adirondacks, where Woolly claims a fortune is waiting for him.
The story is told through multiple perspectives, with two characters–Duchess and the brothers’ friend Sally–telling their stories through first-person narration, while the rest of the characters’ stories–Emmett, Billy, Woolly, and other individuals they meet along the way–are told through third-person, limited narration. I can’t say this switching of narrative styles entirely worked for me, mainly because Sally is a fairly minor character, and giving her the “Duchess” first-person treatment seemed arbitrary. Nevertheless, the story is heavy on character history and development. I quickly grew to hate Duchess for his selfishness and manipulation, but the author provides us insight into the terrible things that had been done to him that made him the way he is (I didn’t hate him any less, but I understood him better).
The story is layered with symbolism, much of it around traveling and “Going West.” Billy is obsessed with going to San Francisco for the practical reason of finding his mother, but it also signals his desire for adventure. In spite of taking only what he can fit in his backpack with him, he includes among his necessary possessions a large book called The Compendium of Heroes, Adventurers, and Other Intrepid Travelers, by one Professor Abenathe. Later on their journey, when Emmett and Billy have to hop a ride on a box car, they meet a wanderer named Ulysses, whose story arc reflects that of Ulysses in the Odyssey.
Some passages in this novel swept me away. There’s a short vignette that Duchess shares about a friend of his father, a performer named Fitzy FitzWilliams, whose long, white beard and penchant for the poetry of Walt Whitman led to a sudden surge of acting gigs during the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death. That led to the even more lucrative career of playing a much-in-demand Santa Claus for society Christmas parties in Manhattan. He could have kept up this seasonal vocation forever; alas, his good fortune ended when he inadvisedly appeared as Karl Marx at a meeting of the Greenwich Village Progressive Society. Once that hit he papers, it was all over for him–nobody wants a Commie Santa.
A lovelier and even sadder tale (again, courtesy of Duchess) focuses on a performer named Marceline Maupassant–a “clown” in the style of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Duchess describes a bit Marceline used to do in which he played a panhandler on a busy street, trying to get the attention of city dwellers who are too absorbed in their own lives to pay him any attention. His hat would slip off his head and he would chase it about the stage, dodging pedestrians and police officers. Then, Marceline would snap his fingers and the action on the stage would come to a stop. “For a few minutes, Marceline would glide about the stage, skating in between the immobile pedestrians with a delicate smile, as if he hadn’t a care in the world.” Then, when he snapped his fingers again, the world went back to the way it was. “But the second or third time you saw it, you might begin to realize that the world wasn’t exactly the way it was. As the shy young woman is walking away, she smiles to discover the long-stemmed rose in her hands. The two men debating by the newsstand pause in their arguments, suddenly less sure of their positions. The nanny who was trying so diligently to appease her crying charge is startled to find him giggling.” Marceline’s story has a tragic end and is intertwined with the tragedy of Duchess’s life. These little vignettes are where Towles’ prose sings.
In spite of all the beautiful prose, I had some issues. Perhaps this is unfair, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that Towles wrote this as an “awards” novel. Sometimes the events of the book and the tie-ins with the symbolism felt too contrived. The maps, the train, meeting Ulysses, the evil hobo, it was just too much. When Duchess, Woolly, and Billy go to the Empire State Building to track down Abernathe, and he’s actually there, and he chats with them, and then he wants to meet Ulysses the train hopper, I wondered whether we had wandered into the realm of magical realism. (I don’t object to magical realism, but nothing else in the novel hinted in that direction). In spite of this, I might have ended up more enthusiastic about the overall effort if Towles had stuck the landing. I simply did not like the ending. I don’t want to give anything away, but I didn’t feel the ending was faithful to Emmett’s character, and I felt disappointed by Duchess’s exit. The only person whose story I felt kind of good about was Sally, who decides to hitch a ride to San Francisco with Emmett and Billy, not for the purpose of fostering a relationship with Emmett, but to strike out on her own.
I wish I had liked this novel more than I did. I wish I could gather up the little vignettes–the Fitzy FitzWilliams, the Marcelines, the young Woolly reciting the Gettysburg Address on the Fourth of July– and bind them into a short story collection. Independently, these excerpts are magical; as a novel, The Lincoln Highway kind of went off the rails.