As it turns out, not reaching the intended destination becomes entirely the point and power of this mischievous, wise and wildly entertaining novel ... Towles goes all in on the kind of episodic, exuberant narrative haywire found in myth or Homeric epic. The novel opens wide, detours beget detours, the point of view expands and rotates ... It’s tempting to speak of the book’s cast of minor characters, though one gradually learns that there are no minor characters. Each one of them, Towles implies, is the central protagonist of an ongoing adventure that is both unique and universal ... At nearly 600 pages, The Lincoln Highway is remarkably brisk, remarkably buoyant. Though dark shadows fall across its final chapters, the book is permeated with light, wit, youth ... when we look through his lens we see that this brief interstice teems with stories, grand as legends.
... gorgeously crafted ... The Lincoln Highway deftly shifts between first- and third-person narration ... Towles binds the novel with compassion and scrupulous detail: his America brims with outcasts scrambling over scraps from the Emerald City, con artists behind the curtain, the innocents they exploit ... Examining the dynamics of race, class and gender, Towles draws a line between the social maladies of then and now, connecting the yearnings of his characters with our own volatile era. He does it with stylish, sophisticated storytelling. There’s no need for fancy narrative tricks ... The Lincoln Highway...is a long and winding road, but one Towles’s motley crew navigates with brains, heart and courage. The novel embraces the contradictions of our character with a skillful hand, guiding the reader forward with 'a sensation of floating—like one who’s being carried down a wide river on a warm summer day.'
That I enjoyed it despite myself is a tribute to Towles’s near-magical gift for storytelling, his ability to construct a cast of characters at once flawed, lovable and fascinating ... Towles gives us what all great road novels give us: the panoramic sweep of the prairies and hills, adventures that seem to spring from the landscape itself, the propulsive rhythm of the road. The novel is told through multiple perspectives and each is as engaging and fully realised as the next. It’s as if the restricted palette of the previous novel has encouraged a rollicking expansiveness here, not only the wide American vistas, but also the narrative, which rambles off down tangents and leaps from one perspective to the next with energetic restlessness. It’s a novel that is as much about the literary history of the American road as it is about the journey itself, and deserves a place alongside Kerouac, Steinbeck and Wolfe as the very best of the genre.
... a joyride ... hitch onto this delightful tour de force and you'll be pulled straight through to the end, helpless against the inventive exuberance of Towles' storytelling ... elegantly constructed and compulsively readable ... Towles' new novel...revisits American myths with a mix of warm-hearted humor and occasional outbursts of physical violence and malevolence that recall E.L. Doctorow's work ... There's so much to enjoy in this generous novel packed with fantastic characters...and filled with digressions, magic tricks, sorry sagas, retributions, and the messy business of balancing accounts.
... [a] fine new novel ... While entertaining the reader with meandering plot and character entanglements, Towles develops a theme familiar from his earlier novels about inheritance ... Towles is creating a nuanced, comic vision of America.
As the reader will quickly realise, The Lincoln Highway is not the novel that it purports to be. The highway itself acts as nothing more than a MacGuffin, or a device that motivates the plot but ends up being entirely irrelevant to the work. Those hoping for the classic road trip novel that the book’s blurb, endpapers, and cover promise it to be will be disappointed as Towles instead decides to ditch the intended plot for a lengthy and laborious cat-and-mouse storyline that takes up the entire novel ... the result, simply, is not cute ... if Towles’ intention for his novel was to actually reflect a journey along the Lincoln Highway, a trip that is surely lengthy, monotonous and exhausting, then he has succeeded with style.
... vivid storytelling, indelible characterization ... an enthralling road novel ... Told in eight distinctive, resonant voices...The Lincoln Highway gives each character’s perspective its due in a wonderful feat of narrative ventriloquism that showcases the ample storytelling gifts evident in Towles’ earlier work ... One of the great things about The Lincoln Highway’s many chapter-by-chapter perspective shifts is what it allows its characters to observe about each other ... That Towles engineers an in-person encounter bringing together Billy and Ulysses with Professor Abernathe himself is not half so remarkable as the fact that he never overplays the scene.
As with any good odyssey, this one is peopled with characters who flit through the story in cameos to move the plot, thwart progress, or add flavor ... Arguably, that cast is a tad too large, and some of the stories range too far afield, but this is Amor Towles in an antic mood, and many of his readers will be willing to follow him wherever he leads. In this case, playing against type, especially for what is at heart a comic novel, he leads us to a morally ambiguous ending ... In a novel that wrestles with thorny questions of moral culpability—such as, if we mean no harm but cause harm nonetheless, how much does our intent weigh in the balance, and what punishment should we accrue?—The Lincoln Highway ends with another question: If we are unknowingly the author of another's misfortune, how is that debt recorded on our moral balance sheet? Towles leaves us to ponder.
... [an] old-fashioned, meandering tale ... The Lincoln Highway bears its weight easily ... The book-within-the-novel is both a convenient source of nested tales and a thematic vector, indicating Towles’ commitment to wrestling with classic Americana—that braid of fact, fiction and derring-do so many of us recognize as a birthright, for better or worse ... That notion of American openness, of ever-fractalizing free will, coming up against the fickle realities of fate is the tension that powers Towles’ exciting, entertaining and sometimes implausible picaresque ... Anyone who follows The Lincoln Highway will relish the trip, bearing in mind that there are roads not taken, whether by choice or for the absence of one.
If you like history and adventure, The Lincoln Highway might be for you. It’s nearly 600 pages but doesn’t feel overdrawn. The pace is fast and writing concise, making it a digestible read whether in bed or at a loud coffee shop.
... twisty—and twee ... There are many close calls (almost every chapter ends in a cliff-hanger), many references to Abraham Lincoln and Independence Day, and frequent invocations of the Count of Monte Cristo and the Three Musketeers, perhaps as a way to give ballast to the novel’s Big Book bona fides ... The Lincoln Highway sags under the weight of these allusions and the expectations they raise. In fact, there’s no particular payoff to all that dropping of lofty names. Perhaps more to the point, the road-trip novel has been written many times before, and Mr. Towles, however much he hears America singing, doesn’t make it feel like a new song ... the shifting back and forth among the principals on matters of philosophy, ethics, magic tricks—and thesauruses—has the effect of diluting the narrative rather than enriching it ... readers of The Lincoln Highway may be excused for wondering: 'Are we there yet?'
... it delivers an overwhelming blast of nostalgia that many readers will welcome even if it doesn't add anything new to the genre. Like the highway, the novel is long, and it winds through adventures in the style of an old-fashioned serial, with an abundance of last-second rescues and romantic philosophizing ... a romantic novel, not in a passion-and-courtship sense but in its idealization of the era ... Readers hungry for the past will delight in this travelogue's touchstones ... Don't look for shades of gray; you won't find them. Towles does introduce two intriguing Black characters, but they exist only to serve the brothers' story, which is a shame, since they're both more interesting than stoic, one-dimensional Emmett ... A skeptic might be tempted to view this parade of Americana with a weary eye.
... [a] superb, sprawling, cross-country saga ... Towles continues to transport readers, immersing them just as completely in the adventures of the Watson brothers he did in the seemingly claustrophobic lives of Count Rostov and his young sidekick ... Packed with drama ... Towles’ fans will be rewarded with many of the same pleasures they’ve come to expect from him: a multitude of stories told at a leisurely pace (the novel clocks in at 592 pages); numerous endearing and sometimes maddening characters; and pitch-perfect plotting with surprises at every turn. As if that weren’t enough, the novel is chock-full of literary references ... Towles has created another winning novel whose pages are destined to be turned—and occasionally tattered—by gratified readers.
Combining familiar elements of the picaresque, a road trip, a getaway car and the hero’s journey, Amor Towles’ absorbing new novel, The Lincoln Highway, is a melange that manages to feel new ... This compressed time frame, as well as the multiple points of view of several characters, given in alternating chapters, create a propulsive narrative and a beguiling story about how the past shapes the future ... The novel’s standout character, however, is charming ne’er-do-well Duchess, whose rough upbringing at the hands of a fraudulent father, an actor and a grifter, has gifted him with street knowledge and a self-made code of honor. His chapters, told in first person, are a marvel of singular voice, a mix of high-flown ironical declamations and truths-told-slant that cause readers to deeply care for this wayward, often dangerous, young man ... Two flaws mar this mostly successful novel. The first is the narrative’s occasional veer toward twee, a tonal choice likely intended to counterbalance darker strains in the story. Still, a reader may find the cuteness meter occasionally ticking too high. The other is a more problematic sub-plot that leans heavily on the 'Magical Negro' trope, a term coined by director Spike Lee to describe a Black character whose function is primarily to help white protagonists out of trouble ... doesn’t shy from sadder realities and that is welcome, as much as we love these young heroes. Sometimes the past turns out to be less inspiration and more fateful reckoning.
In less confident hands, yet another hard-luck road story from America’s endless web of tarmac might quickly run into cliché territory. But Towles sidesteps that with skilful handling: his mythical allusions and epic parallels create a depth and sweep at odds with the story’s premise ... Although set in 1950s America, the novel is essentially timeless. It asks big questions about justice and retribution, the primal wounds of desertion by parents and spouses, the seminal role of storytellers, and probes the dimensions of our responsibility to others ... The complexity of Towles’ characters adds pace and interest ... Towles embraces the obscure mysteries that blend light and darkness in human nature ... although The Lincoln Highway may grip some readers less deeply than A Gentleman in Moscow, the variety of voicings proves convincing as the final pages turn rapidly ... The focus on responsibility and enduring truths makes The Lincoln Highway a timely tonic in our sad era of loony alternate realities and shameless self-interest.
... a breezy Bildungsroman meets road trip that suits the Boston-born Towles’s expansive, folksy, anecdotal style down to the ground ... The touches of homespun wisdom, typical of Towles, seemed quirkily sage in the Tolstoy-inspired A Gentleman in Moscow. Here, they can verge on the trite ... Contrivances such as this detract from the more interesting interplay at the heart of the novel between Emmett, the thoughtful young man who resents the burden of responsibility on his shoulders, and Duchess, the charming chancer who appeals to the wild spirit in us all. Towles has taken a literary risk by writing Emmett’s narrative in the third person and Duchess’s in the first, so that we readers feel closer to the ne’er-do-well than to the good guy. When the full extent of Duchess’s callousness is revealed, it comes as a shock ... With its down-home style and ideas about the lone hero, The Lincoln Highway is pure Americana. Reading it in any other country is like taking a vacation in the Land of the Free: a long, easy, enjoyable if at times hokey ride on a highway filled with adventure.
For fans of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility, the great news this fall is that Amor Towles has a new book. This one is completely different and yet just as compelling as the previous two ... Towles is a consummate storyteller, departing often but briefly from the road trip to deliver tales of his numerous other characters. Because Emmett, Duchess and Woolly had been together in the juvenile camp before the novel begins, there are plenty of stories from their time there as well as each of their family histories ... Towles’ new novel is a rollicking, propulsive and alternately humorous and heartbreaking adventure filled with indelible, haunting characters.
... captivating ... has suspense, humor, philosophy, and a strong sense of time and place, moving quickly and surely toward a satisfying conclusion ... Towles writes smoothly and paces the picaresque story nicely, telling it from a variety of points of view and dividing the novel into sections, starting with No. 10 and moving down to the finale ... Like the intercontinental route that it is named for, The Lincoln Highway is long and filled with intriguing detours. In the hands of a master wordsmith like Towles, it is definitely worth the trip.
The story features an appealing cast of young characters and an ingeniously complicated plot, but doesn’t fully realize its potential as a classic picaresque novel ... There are ample moments of suspense, humor and even pathos ... Towles has chosen to tell the story principally from the perspectives of Emmett, Billy, Woolly, Duchess and Sally, the latter two from a first person point of view. In a few instances, the same events are seen from the viewpoints of different characters. Some of these alternating sections are as short as three pages, but as the lengthy (576-page) novel moves along, the frequent shifts from one character to another begin to feel obtrusive more than refreshing ... fully engages the reader’s sympathies with the Watson brothers and Woolly, and keeps one guessing about the next scheme Duchess will pull from his bag of tricks. This diverting entertainment has its share of daring, amusing and moving moments, but somehow it adds up to less than the sum of its parts.
Massive but light on its feet ... [A] playfully thought-provoking novel ... Towles, paying more than a passing nod to Huckleberry Finn, juggles the pieces of his plot deftly, shifting from voice to voice, skirting sentimentality and quirkiness with a touch of wistful regret, and leading up to an ending that is bound to provoke discussion.
A modern picaresque with a host of characters, competing points of view, wandering narratives, and teasing chapter endings, Towles' third novel is even more entertaining than his much-acclaimed A Gentleman in Moscow ... A remarkable blend of sweetness and doom, Towles' novel is packed with revelations about the American myth, the art of storytelling, and the unrelenting pull of history. An exhilarating ride through Americana.
