The Lincoln Highway: A Read with Jenna Pick

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles is yet another triumph from a masterful storyteller. From the very first pages, Towles draws you in with his graceful prose and irresistible sense of momentum. The novel is set in 1954 and follows 18-year-old Emmett Watson as he sets off on a journey with his younger brother, Billy, intending to head west and start a new life. But when two friends from a work farm derail their plans, the road leads in a very different direction—east, toward New York City.Towles has a gift for crafting characters who feel fully alive. I found myself deeply invested in each of them: Emmett with his quiet resolve, Billy with his precocious charm, Duchess with his cunning and contradictions, and Woolly with his heartbreakingly innocent view of the world. The alternating perspectives add depth and nuance to their evolving relationships and the moral choices they face.Though the story takes place over just ten days, it has the emotional richness of an epic. The themes of redemption, loyalty, family, and destiny are explored with subtlety and grace. Towles doesn’t just write a road trip—he gives us a moving meditation on the detours life throws our way and how we navigate them.Highly recommended for readers who enjoy character-driven novels that combine literary elegance with narrative drive. Towles proves once again that he knows how to tell a story that lingers long after the final page.

I bought this for a friend, who very much enjoyed the story.

I listened to this book on audio, which may have made a difference. Either way, I have never read a book where one of the main characters can be heroic, sympathetic, completely aggravating, and lovable all at the same time. I won’t mention which character, but if you read the book, I think you will know. What stands out to me is the rich, complex texture of these characters. It’s not where the book ends that matters most but the journey itself. This is a perfect book for a book club, because there is so much to contemplate and discuss. Lovely writing.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's a great tale, told in a unique way.

This was so good, had me on the edge of my seat the whole way through. The end is kinda of sad. But it is still a good story and I can’t wait to read his next one.

This is a master of storytelling. The book is as much of thrilling and well told story as it is a celebration of storytelling itself. I didn’t want to end.

A good read and charter development

The book starts out slowly at first, but it picks up mid way, and ends well. There were spots with very profound messages. I enjoyed it, although it took me a while to get into it.

I enjoyed the many differences of the unique characters, who came to life as you turned the pages. The author has done an admirable job, but I kept comparing it to his two best sellers. I kept waiting to be drawn in, and anxious to read the next chapter, but The Lincoln Highway did not come close to either, for me.

This book wasn’t what I expected, and that’s a good thing. I like surprises. The characters are very individualized and three-dimensional. The story had twists and turns, and by the end you realize there are deeper meanings to it. I found myself relating to the characters in different ways. 18-year old Emmett has lost his father, his mother, and then his father’s farm, all while dealing with having just been released from a juvenile work farm for unintentionally killing another boy in a fight. Now he has to make a plan for himself and his 10-year old brother, Billy, to make a new life together. But Emmett’s well-laid plans to travel the Lincoln Highway from Nebraska to San Francisco to start that new life are thrown into chaos by the unexpected appearance of two other boys his age, Duchess and Wooly, both of whom had been at the work farm with him and escaped. Duchess is mercurial and chaotic, though often well-meaning, and Wooly is intellectually challenged, but kind. Along the way, the four boys come to meet some other notable characters who sometimes help them and sometimes challenge them.There are some almost-spoilers below, so stop here if you worry about it….The name of the book is a bit misleading. The Lincoln Highway is really a “McGuffin” in that it triggers the plot but isn’t actually the planned route they ultimately follow. I didn’t mind that, but it did break the “contract with the reader” if you will, from the initial plan that was laid out early in the book. Really, the plot is driven by Duchess, a troubled boy who has his own motivations, which he justifies in different ways, that throws everyone else’s plans asunder. Frankly, all of the characters have tragic histories, which makes them very interesting. Another oddity about this book is that it starts sort of in the middle of the story (which is actually a plot point stated by Billy, who is obsessed with a book about heroes and their journeys), and at the end of the book you realize that the story hasn’t really ended for some of the characters yet. None of these things really take away from the quality of the story, it’s just something to note that sets this book apart from others and makes it unique. I will say, though, that Duchess was so much the driver of the story that all the other characters were a little weaker for it, where they were mostly reacting to Duchess in one way or another.One thing I definitely did not like, though, was that the dialogue is written without quotation marks. Rather, Towles uses a dash to signify when a speaker has started dialogue, but nothing to signify when they stop the dialogue. Thus, it was occasionally confusing when they stopped and the prose began. Towles also needed more dialogue tags, as sometimes I was confused who was speaking which sentences.Be prepared that this has a bit of a tragic ending that left me concerned for the motives of some of the characters I’d come to like. But overall, it was a worthy read.

Goodreads Choice Awards for 2021 gave 5th place to this book in the category “Historical Fiction”. Two thoughts:[1] The books that came out 1st thru 4th must be absolutely marvelous[2] Just because a story takes place in 1954, should that book have to be classified as “historical” fiction? Maybe reserve that category for books such as “Killer Angels”, which fictionalized historic figures during historical times.For those who assume “The Lincoln Highway” is about a road trip on the Lincoln Highway, my feeling is: not really. The planned trip goes awry quickly, and in the opposite direction, too. But that’s okay because this book is focused on characters: especially on three older boys (Emmett, Duchess and Woolly) and Emmett’s 8-year-old brother, Billy. The three older boys met and became friends at youth correctional work farm. They came from diverse family backgrounds and certainly had different ways of thinking and reacting to circumstances. And Billy is, well, Billy: young, intelligent, idealistic and vulnerable.The boys’ plans continue to go awry for a myriad of reasons: the effects of a flawed upbringing, bad decision making, absolutely crazy decision making, others doing bad things, others doing good things, etc. For anyone wanting to read a story that linearly goes from A to Z, you may become absolutely frustrated with the flow of events as things rarely go as expected. And yet, I greatly enjoyed this book. Go figure.Bottom Line: Great characters. Interesting story. Clever, almost poetic, ending.Note: Some reviewers rated this book low because they felt it wasn’t as good as the author’s other books. So I am definitely going to read some of those other books.

Towles sprinkles the book with enchanting observations about us as humans. like his description of photographs as containing all that came before, while we view them with all that came afterward. The book is rich with them. As a result, I immediately picked up A Gentleman in Moscow, where he (page 14) compares our relationship with family things we've given up:"But experience is less likely to teach us how to bid our dearest possessions adieu. And if it were to? We wouldn't welcome the education. For eventually, we come to hold our dearest possessions more closely than we hold our friends. We carry them from place to place, often at considerable cost and inconvenience; we dust and polish their surfaces and reprimand children for playing too roughly in their vicinity -- all the while, allowing memories to invest them with greater and greater importance. This armoire, we are prone to recall, is the very one in which we hid as a boy; and it was these silver candelabra that lined our table at Christmas eve; and it was with this handkerchief that she once dried her tears, et cetera, et cetera. Until we imagine that these carefully preserve possessions mi9ght give us genuine solace in the face of a lost companion."A worthwhile read.

The time was June of 1954, the place was a bankrupt farm in rural Nebraska, and the two central characters in this work of fiction were the Watson brothers, Emmett who was eighteen and his little brother Billy, who was eight. Emmett had been serving a sentence at a boy's reformatory for his part in the unintentional death of a local bully, but when his father died of cancer, a decision was made to release Emmett so that he could return home to care for his little brother.Billy had been staying with neighbors awaiting his brother's return, while the bank had been preparing foreclosure documents on the family property. The neighbors were Sally, a nineteen-year-old friend of the Watson's, and her father. Sally was plainspoken to a fault and somewhat resentful of her lot in life - which seemed to be taking care of her father until some other man for her to take care of would come along, but she cared for Billy with the fierceness of a mother hen watching over her only chick.As the story opened, Emmett, who had been serving his sentence on a work farm in Salina, Kansas, was being driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the reformatory. Emmett had plans to pick up his brother, spend a final day or two in the farmhouse, and then head out to Texas with Billy where he would make his fortune buying, remodeling, and selling houses, all financed by the secret nest-egg of three thousand dollars that their father had managed to hide from his creditors at the bank.But Billy had a different plan. He had found a cache of postcards written by their mother just after she abandoned the family several years before - postcards that their father kept secret from the boys. The postmarks and notes on the cards indicated that after their mother left the family she had traveled along the Lincoln Highway, the nation's first transnational paved thoroughfare, headed for California. (The Lincoln Highway ran from Times Square in New York City to Lincoln Park in San Francisco. The Watson's farm was close to the halfway point on the highway.) Emmett had no interest in reconnecting with their mother, but Billy, who was little more than in infant when she left, did. He eventually managed to convince Emmett that California was growing faster than Texas and would be a better prospect for his home renovation plans.All of their plans, however, were thrown into a cocked hat when Duchess and Woolly, two other young men who were serving time at the facility in Salina with Emmett, turned up at the Watson's farm after having stowed away in the trunk of the warden's car just as the warden and Emmett were preparing to leave Salina and head for Nebraska. Duchess was the son of an itinerate vaudeville actor and spent a lot of time growing up on the road and in and around New York City. Woolly was the son of a socially prominent New York family. Duchess, a charming plotter and manipulator, wanted Emmett - who had his own car - to drive them to New York where Woolly would access a pile of cash ($150,000) which his grandfather had set aside for him in the family safe as a "trust fund." If Emmett would drive them, they would split the trust three ways and Emmett would be set for set up to be a major homebuilder in California.Emmett, who regarded himself as far more sensible than the other two former reformatory inmates, declined, but he eventually agreed to go out of his way and take them to the train station in Omaha where the escapees could board a train for New York City. However, while they were enroute to Omaha, Emmett managed to get distracted by another of Duchess's misadventures long enough for Duchess to "borrow" his car - and Duchess and Woolly headed off to New York leaving the Watson brothers stranded in rural Nebraska.Emmett called Sally who came and transported them to the train station in Omaha where Emmett intended to board a train and head to New York City to get his car back, But after Sally left them at the train station, Emmett realized that his money, the nest-egg of $3,000, was still in the trunk of his car under the spare tire. After some careful research, he found an express freight train that was headed to New York City, and he and Billy secreted themselves in a boxcar.And from there Emmett and Billy Watson began a journey which was marked by personal adventures and encounters with characters very reminiscent those experienced by Huck and Jim as they floated down the Mississippi on their raft in a bygone era.The Lincoln Highway is a character-driven tale that is and pulled along through narratives of each major individual in the story. The manner in which it is presented, through the varying viewpoints, enables readers to gain a fuller perspective of what is actually happening, and it adds to the compelling nature of story. The pages, nearly six hundred of them, turn quickly.While The Lincoln Highway, is a very satisfying reading experience, the plotting is far from predictable and it keeps the reader's attentio...

I very much liked this novel. Amor Towles is an excellent author and I am a big fan. I have read his first three novels and really liked every one of them. His stories are very different than much of current American popular fiction. That is why one finds a wide range of reviews.I feel the story is only tangentially related to “The Lincoln Highway”. Therefore do not expect a road trip type story depicting all of the towns along the way. This is a very different modern adventure story.No matter the level of excellence, not everyone will enjoy this novel. It is a really a coming of age adventure novel set in the 1950s in the United States. There are shifting narrators. At times the story seems to meander, but I felt it mostly always came back on course and apparent diversions become woven into the story. In this context, one must pay attention.On the other hand, the story is clearly written. It is mostly modern American conversational English. As such it makes for a good, but not simple, candidate for an audiobook. I purchased the novel on Kindle and also the accompanying audiobook. I listened and read simultaneously. I am glad that I did both. Sometimes I purchase an audiobook and listen rather than read whilst commuting. This book is a bit too intricate for that as far as I am concerned. I gave it my full attention.In the event one enjoys this structure of a story, one may enjoy “A Man Called Ove” by Fredrik Backman. The stories are completely different. But the clever turns of phrase and story are part of that story also. Both also include a very interesting female secondary character.In summary I really like this book. I can completely understand how someone else might not. It is not a light work of simple fiction. With a book like this, if it gets slightly tedious I simply take a break and get back to it when I feel I am ready. Amor Towles is one of my favorite contemporary American authors. But his works are different. Thank You for taking the time to read this review.

*Very minor spoilers*The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles."When it comes to waiting, has-beens have had plenty of practice. Like when they were waiting for their big break, or for their number to come in. Once it became clear that those things weren't going to happen, they started waiting for other things. Like for the bars to open, or the welfare check to arrive. Before too long, they were waiting to see what it would be like to sleep in a park, or to take the last two puffs from a discarded cigarette. They were waiting to see what new indignity they could become accustomed to while they were waiting to be forgotten by those they once held dear. But most of all, they waited for the end."I was taking a training and noticed that my (new to me) coworker next to me had a book themed sticker on their laptop. When the break rolled around we talked about books. She told me she just finished the Lincoln Highway and that she really liked it. I put the book on my wishlist and a day or so later found my wife bought it for me. At this point, I knew it was hardcover and had a train on the cover. By happenstance, I'd finished my last book when this one arrived so on sight of hundreds of unread books I read the newest one in the pile.The Lincoln Highway is the story of three young men and an adolescent boy traveling across the United States in 1954. They all have their motivations for their trek. The book is an interesting review of mid-century America. There's a jail break, a lengthy discourse on making preserves, revenge, manslaughter, mental heath, an erotic circus, a mythic hobo, a professor writing about heroes from the Empire State Building, a washed up alcoholic vaudevillian Karl Marx impersonator, nuns, fetuccini, sneaking aboard freight trains, silver dollars, and salvation. More than anything I suppose the book is about family, specifically fathers.What I enjoyed most were the characters. As the preceding paragraph might suggest the characters can be larger than life as are the situations they find themselves in. At nearly 600 pages the characters have plenty of time to develop. I will say despite the length a few pages seemed wasted. While this book is definitely about the journey there are a few parts of the book that seem to slow down. By the end of the volume there are also a quite a few plot threads that aren't resolved which is probably my chief detraction from the book.In spite of a few resolutions missing from the book I didn't necessarily feel cheated or that I'd wasted my time with the book. Towles' writing, characterization, and settings are superb. He also drops a few lines of prose that are terrific. Overall I'd definitely cross the country with these characters again. 5/5.

Having read Amor Towles "The Gentleman from Moscow" twice, it is on my "All Time Favorites" book list. I anxiously awaited the publishing of his most recent book, "The Lincoln Highway." Once again, Towles does not disappoint. Some may think it starts out a little slowly, but it's necessary for what's to come. The further you get into the book, the faster the pace. His characters, Emmett, Billy, Sally, Duchess, Woolly, and Ulysses, are fleshed out and each serve a purpose in the storyline. There is so much in this book, forgiveness, love, compassion, selfishness, honor, and honesty.The story begins with Emmett being released from a reform school. While he was away, his father died and his little brother, Billy, stays with their next door neighbors, Sally and her father. Although their father came from a well-heeled Boston family, he chose to make his own way in the world by moving to Nebraska to become a farmer; something that was not in his skill set. When Emmett returns home the farm has been foreclosed upon. Not only did their father lose the farm and everything he had of value, their mother left years earlier.Having to vacate their home, the brothers go through the house looking for anything they may want salvage and take with them. Billy found a box and inside were eight postcards that their mother sent to them after she left, but were kept from them by their father. The last postcard is mailed from San Francisco. Billy is convinced that San Francisco is where they can find their mother. Emmett on the other hand, has his sights set on Texas. Prior to going away, Emmett was an apprentice to a carpenter. His time away gave him time to think about his life and what he wanted to do.He decided to use his carpentry skills to start a business buying run down houses, renovating them and reselling them when finished (this is 1954, the term "flipping" was not in the lexicon). Unlike his father, Emmett is not above seeking assistance when needed. He goes to the local library to research the demographics of California and Texas. He learns that California's population is growing rapidly and is predicted to continue to do so. The demographics for Texas are not as promising. Returning home, Emmett tells Billy that they are going to California. Eight-year old Billy, a precocious and bright little boy, is delighted. They pull out the next day headed to California in Emmett's Studebaker and the adventure begins--and what an adventure it is!

18-year-old Emmett Watson is the protagonist of LINCOLN HIGHWAY, the first transcontinental highway. He returns from reform school to deal with the foreclosure of his father’s farm. He has a plan to take his 8-year-old brother Billy to California and with the money his father has left him purchase a dilapidated house he can remodel and sell to purchase two more and so on and so on. He picks California because it has 16 million people who need housing. Billy wants to be in San Francisco by the 4th of July to meet their mother who had sent them postcards after leaving their father. The last one she sent was from San Francisco, and he expects to find her at the 4th of July celebration which she loved.Before Emmett can set off on his quest (this is definitely a quest novel, and Emmett is the hero) two of his friends from the reformatory show up. They hitched a ride in the trunk of the warden’s car that delivered Emmett to the farm. Duchess and Woolly steal Emmett’s Studebaker before he can begin his trip. The novel is divided into sections where we get various characters’ viewpoints. We learn from Duchess and Woolly that they “borrow” Emmett’s car to recover Woolly’s $150,000 inheritance. Emmett and Billy hitch a ride on a train to follow them and recoup Emmett’s car. Emmett thinks he knows where to find Duchess.Billy carries a big red book with him wherever he goes. He’s read it 35 times at one point. Professor Abacus Abernathe’s Compendium of Heroes, Adventurers, and Other Intrepid Travelers is really the heart of the novel. Emmett and Billy are riding in the train when Emmett goes to find food. Billy is harassed by a hobo named Preacher John who tries to steal his silver dollar collection. A black man named Ulysses saves him. Billy explains where Ulysses got his name. He shows him the section on the Ulysses in his book and how he spent ten years trying to get home after the Siege of Troy. Ulysses has spent almost that long riding the rails trying to find his family which he lost while he was fighting in WWII. Ulysses is fascinated by the book. At one point he says the professor and Billy gave him hope which he had lost over time.Duchess is also obsessed with getting even with his father who was the reason he was sent to the reformatory. He doesn’t seem to realize he has more in common with his father than he had thought. Duchess will do anything to find get that $150,000 inheritance. Dear Reader, you will spend most of the book in the environs of New York City and upstate. Only towards the end will Emmett and Billy finally set off for California, but not before Sally shows up. Sally is the girl next door back home in Nebraska. She cooks and cleans and takes care of everybody with little thanks. She’s expecting a call from Emmett from New York. When she doesn’t get it, she hops in her truck and drives 20 hours to New York where the truck dies but not before she finds them with Woolly’s sister. She wants to go with them to California, and she won’t settle for anything less.There’s a scene where Billy figures out a combination to Woolly’s great grandfather’s safe that you won’t believe, but you have to remember that Billy is a mystical kid who was saved by the reincarnation of Ulysses. There are charming sections of this book. Woolly is another lovable character. He literally wouldn’t hurt a fly, and his destiny will make you sad. I was also rooting for Sally. Emmett doesn’t seem to realize that their relationship is written in the stars.

Excuse me, but a story should tell – well, a story. ‘The Lincoln Highway’ could be a great book. Towles has the talent, no question. But for some reason he doesn’t stick to the story. Or, to be more precise, he doesn’t tell it as good as he could. He mucks it up with irrelevant goop.Emmett and his 8-year-old brother, Billy, are leaving on a road trip to California to find their mother, who abandoned them years ago. But before they can take the first step their plans are ambushed by Duchess and Wooly, a couple of fellow inmates and characters Emmett met while at a juvenile work camp in Nebraska. Great potential. But the tale is also ambushed, multiple times. Like a dirt road up a mountain pass, Towles goes on one rambling sidetrack after another. And many of them contain little or nothing to send the story forward. It bloats his book. His folksy, homespun dialogue is nice but only carries the endless backstories so far. Eventually it wears thin. The philosophical claptrap comes across as overdone insights espoused by children. The backward counting chapters and the dashes instead of quotation marks seemed gimmicky and purposeless. The ever-changing POVs were an annoyance, and I sometimes had trouble recalling what was going on in the current POV character’s story arc. Having to backtrack on a book is not a good sign.Towels does a great job of setting up the book. The beginning is totally captivating. His prose is excellent. He enlists some wonderful characters, even if they are camouflaged by a host of secondary ordinaries. The relationship between Emmett and Billy was the glue that kept things going. Kept me reading.It’s a shame that a five-star book was highjacked by rambling side stories and overdone philosophy. I believe the last 50 pages which set up the ending was ingenious, and supplied a fitting conclusion. It is the 400 pages in the middle that sends the book into ordinary-ism.