Review | The Lincoln Highway - treachery, tragedy, triumphs and epiphanies in teenagers’ nine-day odyssey across 1950s America
- Homeless and abandoned, teenager Emmett Watson has the weight of the world on his shoulders when he sets off for a new life along America’s Lincoln Highway
- With echoes of the Odyssey, Amor Towles makes him a Ulysses figure who challenges us to draw the line between myth and reality in a novel of timeless relevance
The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles, pub. Viking
Bestselling novelist Amor Towles creates plucky and likeable heroes who rise admirably above grim and complex circumstances. True to form, his third novel, The Lincoln Highway, begins with our hero, 18-year-old Emmett Watson, facing a heavy load of misfortune.
Emmett returns to his forlorn Nebraska home after serving a reformatory term for killing a man by accident. Emmett’s bankrupt father has just died after years of farming failure. His mother deserted the family years earlier. And the bank has foreclosed on the farm.
I did warn you: grim.
Homeless and parentless, Emmett points his old Studebaker towards the open road to build a new life for himself and his razor-sharp younger brother, Billy. Much of their nine-day adventure takes place on the eponymous Lincoln Highway, one of America’s oldest coast-to-coast routes.
