![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Book Review: The Lincoln Highway
Jan. 7th, 2022 08:59 amAfter I finished Amor Towles’ The Lincoln Highway I had to sit with it a while before deciding, rather cautiously, that indeed I did like it, although I did not always enjoy the process of reading it.
Actually, I liked most things about the process of reading it: the main character Emmett and his relationship with his much-younger brother, Billy, a sturdy and earnest eight-year-old; the girl next door, Sally, whose acerbic voice made for one of my favorite POVs in the book; in fact, the rotating POVs in general, which gave a kaleidoscopic view of the story, and also allowed glimpses into nooks and crannies of mid-twentieth century America that we would have missed if the book stuck strictly to Emmett’s POV.
And I very much enjoyed the book’s portrait of America in the early 1950s, which is not a time that historical fiction often visits. (I like the old standbys like World War II as much as anyone, but it is nice to get off the beaten track every once in a while.) Towles has a gift for evoking times and places, and the premise of this book (a road trip on the Lincoln Highway) gives him a virtuoso canvas on which to evoke many places, and even (in the form of flashbacks) a number of different times.
HOWEVER. There was one fly in the ointment, and unfortunately he was a big fly - a horsefly, if you will - as his actions propelled much of the plot. That fly is Emmett’s former jailmate, Duchess.
So when the book starts, Emmett has just been released from a work farm for juvenile offenders. The warden drives him back to the family farm (which has just gone under on the mortgage, but that’s fine with Emmett, whose plan was already to get the heck out of Nebraska) and drops him off… at which point Emmett discovers that two of his jailmates escaped in the trunk of the warden’s car.
These are Woolly (a sweetheart, exactly as fuzzy-brained as his name suggests) and Duchess, a charming conman, who has come up with a plan to steal Woolly’s not-inconsiderable inheritance out of a safe at Woolly’s family’s summer home in the Adirondacks. He tries to entice Emmett into giving them a ride by promising to cut him in on the take.
When that doesn’t work, Duchess steals Emmett’s car, which just so happens to contain all the money Emmett has in the world to make a new start with his little brother Billy.
( Spoilers )
Actually, I liked most things about the process of reading it: the main character Emmett and his relationship with his much-younger brother, Billy, a sturdy and earnest eight-year-old; the girl next door, Sally, whose acerbic voice made for one of my favorite POVs in the book; in fact, the rotating POVs in general, which gave a kaleidoscopic view of the story, and also allowed glimpses into nooks and crannies of mid-twentieth century America that we would have missed if the book stuck strictly to Emmett’s POV.
And I very much enjoyed the book’s portrait of America in the early 1950s, which is not a time that historical fiction often visits. (I like the old standbys like World War II as much as anyone, but it is nice to get off the beaten track every once in a while.) Towles has a gift for evoking times and places, and the premise of this book (a road trip on the Lincoln Highway) gives him a virtuoso canvas on which to evoke many places, and even (in the form of flashbacks) a number of different times.
HOWEVER. There was one fly in the ointment, and unfortunately he was a big fly - a horsefly, if you will - as his actions propelled much of the plot. That fly is Emmett’s former jailmate, Duchess.
So when the book starts, Emmett has just been released from a work farm for juvenile offenders. The warden drives him back to the family farm (which has just gone under on the mortgage, but that’s fine with Emmett, whose plan was already to get the heck out of Nebraska) and drops him off… at which point Emmett discovers that two of his jailmates escaped in the trunk of the warden’s car.
These are Woolly (a sweetheart, exactly as fuzzy-brained as his name suggests) and Duchess, a charming conman, who has come up with a plan to steal Woolly’s not-inconsiderable inheritance out of a safe at Woolly’s family’s summer home in the Adirondacks. He tries to entice Emmett into giving them a ride by promising to cut him in on the take.
When that doesn’t work, Duchess steals Emmett’s car, which just so happens to contain all the money Emmett has in the world to make a new start with his little brother Billy.
( Spoilers )
