The Lincoln Highway

The Lincoln Highway is Amor Towles's 2021 third novel, the New York Times bestseller and the road-novel follow-up to A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) and Rules of Civility (2011). The structural premise is Emmett Watson, an eighteen-year-old recently released from a Kansas juvenile-detention work farm in June 1954, returning home to his Nebraska farm to collect his eight-year-old brother Billy and drive the family Studebaker west to California to look for the mother who left them years earlier. Two other inmates from the work farm, Duchess Hewett and Wooly Martin, have stowed away in the trunk of the warden's car that drove Emmett home. Duchess and Wooly have a different plan: drive east to New York to collect twenty-five thousand dollars from a Hudson Valley estate Wooly's family controls.

Towles's structural method is the patient eight-character ensemble construction across the ten days of the eastbound trip; each character gets first-person chapters and the trip runs simultaneously from Emmett's Nebraska perspective, Duchess's opportunistic perspective, Wooly's gentle-but-troubled perspective, and Billy's eight-year-old perspective informed entirely by his encyclopedia of mythic-heroes that he reads through the entire trip. The Hudson Valley estate chapters in the middle third are the structural emotional center of the novel. The Billy chapters across the whole novel are some of the strongest contemporary American literary prose about a specific eight-year-old's consciousness. The Sally Ransom subplot is the structural weak spot of an otherwise carefully built novel.

Recommended for Towles's growing literary commercial audience, for fans of A Gentleman in Moscow looking for the next Towles, and for the broader contemporary literary commercial road-novel tradition. Compare to Lonesome Dove (Larry McMurtry), All the King's Men (Robert Penn Warren), and Towles's own Rules of Civility (2011) as the structural antecedents. The Edoardo Ballerini full-cast audiobook is the definitive audio production. Four solid stars, slightly under A Gentleman in Moscow.