A Gentleman in Moscow was one of those novels where to describe it as a bestseller is truly an understatement. Haunting the bestseller charts for years, it surely provided its author, Amor Towles, with the stability of never having to write an earnest word ever again in his life. Nevertheless, he persisted.
The Lincoln Highway offers us a thick slice of Americana. Even the title itself, a reference to the first transcontinental highway to traverse the United States, conjures images of red deserts, of straight-as-an-arrow roads, of Buicks and Cadillacs, of sea to shining sea, of Henry Fonda, of Stars and Stripes forever and ever.
Our main character, Emmett Watson, fresh from a stint on a juvenile work farm, hatches a plan to retrace the route his mother took along the Lincoln Highway when she disappeared to California years before. After enlisting his younger brother, the precocious Billy, all goes awry when two of Emmett’s friends, stowaways from the work farm, turn up with a plan regarding a safety deposit box, $150,000, and an eye set in the opposite direction: New York.
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.
Were Towles a writer in the vein of, say, Calvino or Pirandello, the concept of a novel that takes its entire length before the characters can come together and begin their intended plot would be genius. Sadly, Towles is not this writer and the result, simply, is not cute. However, 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.
