The Lincoln Highway

Amor Towles, former investment banker and now a best-selling writer, is not a prolific author. He has published three novels since 2010: Rules of Civility, A Gentleman in Moscow, and his latest release, The Lincoln Highway. 

“I’ve read everything he’s written!” probably doesn’t sound very impressive… 

But Towles is one of the few authors writing books I would read again. Normally, I plow through novels like a freight train through snow drifts—no turning back. Towles’s books, however, are extraordinary; representative of the time and thought he pours into them. For a reader who respects the classics but is more comfortable with genre fiction than The Great Books, Towles offers an alternative: literary fiction that feels like a classic but has you flipping pages like a USA Today bestseller. 

When I read his Rules of Civility, I felt as if I was reading a cross between Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Funny thing, I remember little from those classics, but couldn’t put the Towles book down. 

When I read A Gentleman in Moscow, Tolstoy came to mind. I have no idea why, because I’ve never read a Tolstoy novel (just a couple of short stories.) And you would think a story about a man who stays in the same hotel for thirty years would run about the same pace as Tolstoy, but that’s Towles’s genius. Another book I shouldn’t like but ended up loving. 

I knew The Lincoln Highway involved a road trip, and I tried to picture how that “link to the classics” was going to work. Would I feel like I was reading Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath or Travels with Charley? I was hoping for something a little more upbeat and my level. Mark Twain and his iconic Huckleberry Finn, maybe? 

My youngest boys wrote and illustrated a book for my daughter’s college graduation a couple years ago about her impending road trip from Durham, NC to Tacoma, WA. Structured like The Odyssey, it included a strange hitchhiker, stale jojos from The Flying J truck stop, and zombies chasing my daughter, moaning “Bras” (my sons were later horrified to discover they had misspelled “brains.”) This was the type of road trip I hoped Towles had authored!

I was not disappointed. The Lincoln Highway takes place over ten days in 1954 and ranges from the Midwest to New York City. The novel’s tone is much closer to Mark Twain and my boys’ masterpiece than Steinbeck. He seems to have done it again because when I finished, I felt like I had read a page-turner from Homer (my oxymoron.) He has put together unique and rich characters, each on a personal quest, with the road trip as the “coming of age” vehicle. 

My only critique is a backwards compliment. Towles’s character development is so good, I invested myself in the minor players as much as the main characters. At the conclusion, he left me with questions as to the fate of those other players. 

If you’re a reader of literature, then approach this book recognizing it’s more Twain than Steinbeck. If you’re a genre reader and rarely read anything that gets a book review, I encourage you to give The Lincoln Highway a go. Some good ol’ boys on a road trip! What could go wrong? 

But if you read nothing older than 2005, prefer short sentences and lots of suspense (like me) then I’ll throw you another recommendation that’s nothing like Towles’s work. Try Five Total Strangers by Natalie D. Richards.