I enjoyed Towles's A Gentleman in Moscow so much that I plunged right into The Lincoln Highway and loved it even more!
A bit of background--the Lincoln Highway is a coast-to-coast highway, running from NYC's Times Square to Lincoln Park in San Francisco. I fully expected this to be the chronicle of a cross-county road trip with much of the action taking place west of the Mississippi. That's what the main character, 18-year-old Emmett Watson, thinks when he and 9-year-old brother, Billy, decide to drive to San Francisco from Nebraska to search for their mother after he is released from a juvenile work farm when his father dies, leaving Billy without a guardian.
The story actually is an odyssey but mostly eastward, first to Chicago and then NYC and then upstate New York. After Duchess and Wooly, two fellow inmates (for lack of a better term) from the work farm, break out and latch onto the brothers, the four make their way east together and separately, settling scores and paying debts along the way as they navigate who they are and who they want to be.
The novel takes place in the late spring of 1954, seventy years ago, so the world of Emmett, Billy, Duchess, and Wooly is both familiar and foreign. Emmett is essentially the straight man--earnest but hot-tempered, protective of Billy but often unable to effectively protect him. Billy is a joy--intelligent, passionate, innocent, loyal. Duchess is the con man but with a hard luck story that will break your heart. Wooly is a lost soul, much like Billy but without the wits to make it in the stuffy, upper-crust world into which he was born.
With the boys, we hop freight cars, eat at Howard Johnsons, fight off hooligans, and visit a hobo village, a burlesque circus, the Empire State Building, and mansions of the super rich.
I'm not sure if Towles was more inspired by Twain's Huckleberry Finn or Homer's Odyssey, but both are there in the adventures and misadventures, in the physical and emotional journeys, in the pathos, and in the secondary characters and iconic settings. Just as Huck and Jim raft down the Mississippi to escape bondage and live free and Odysseus struggles to make his way back to Ithaca and normality after the Trojan War, our boys are both breaking away and trying to set right their upside-down-inside-out worlds.
Speaking of secondary characters, I absolutely loved meeting Dr. Abacus Abernathy, author of Billy's favorite book, which he has read over twenty times, and which serves as his personal guidebook to life. Ulysses (yes, there really is a character named Ulysses) was also a favorite of mine, as was Sally, the girl next door who somehow manages to tag along without really tagging along.
Definitely a 5-star novel. It probably comes closest to being the Great American Novel of anything I have reach in the past couple of decades.
