Women are few and far between though a few influential figures pop up along the route, notably Sally Ransom. Like “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” this is a book about males. They are first drawn to New York City which is, after all, the starting point of the Lincoln Highway. The reformatory is the narrative’s starting point, but money is always a problem for them as they head out toward their futures. The novel’s time period is an essential element in the trip Towles sets out for his young men and his readers.įorced by legal measures or parental demands to serve sentences at the Salina Juvenile Detention Center in rural Nebraska, the young men, once free, are ripe to pursue what America has to offer them. It was a time when progress abounded and the American way seemed to be leading the world toward bigger and better things. Eisenhower - that is, after the Second World War and the Korean War, but pre-Vietnam, pre-Civil Rights, and pre-the sexual revolution. They belong to a mobile but more innocent time in the country’s storied history - the era of Dwight D. Moreover, they are just out of a reform farm and are now free to remake their lives. They are eighteen-year-olds in the age of the automobile. But they are Towles’s picaresque adventurers who seek to contend with and, when necessary, challenge, the images of America they meet in their travels. The boys of “The Lincoln Highway” aren’t quite boys in the spirit of their younger cultural predecessors, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. The action takes place over 10 days in June 1954. Some of the events he chooses may seem at times a little chancy in the light of the narrative’s commitment to realistic occurrences. Unexpected twists occur and surprising characters appear as Towles explores that world through the activities of his characters.
The novel has much of the stylistic panache, chatty veneer and underlying sweetness of Towles’ “Gentleman,” but it focuses entirely upon the United States of America in the early 1950s. It takes the form of a boys-only road trip which Towles presents from several points of view. “The Lincoln Highway” offers a litany of madcap adventures, near missteps, and merry doings. Indeed, it can be seen as Towles’s inspired attempt to write himself into the American literary canon. The answer is a new and very different novel characterized by its emphasis on American energy, experience, and outlook.
After reading it one had to wonder - what could he do next to measure up to the warm splendours of “A Gentleman?” How would his own American background play out? Amor Towles’ long-awaited followup to “A Gentleman in Moscow” will inevitably be a disappointment for some readers who enjoyed that extraordinary novel.
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