Adventure, honour and death in 1950s America

Bookshelf: Review by David Burke

THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY

BY AMOR TOWLES

HUTCHINSON €14.99

SOMETIMES your experience of a book that has been out for a year or two is so good that you immediately rush out to buy the author’s latest publication.

Late last year a keen reader lent me her copy of A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, and I was smitten.

In case you have not heard of it, it is the story of a Russian aristocrat who is placed under, not house arrest but hotel arrest, after the Revolution.

He is at first confined to his usual suite in the Metropol Hotel (Moscow’s equivalent of the Shelbourne), but before long he is sent upstairs – up many stairs – to a little room under the roof.

Here he sets himself up with a few choice pieces of furniture from the family mansion, and spends the next few decades observing the progress of the new Russia and its ruling bureaucracy through his interactions with the guests who come and go in the hotel.

The Stalinist purges of the 1930s, the Great Patriotic War, the cold war of the 1950s: all are played out obliquely through the actions and conversations of the guests with whom Count Alexander Rostov becomes involved.

Towles imagines the mental universe of an old-style aristocrat, a man of breeding, cultivation and erudition with a keen moral sense, with extraordinary clarity.

Written with elegance and wit, and a deep wisdom, the story meanders gently along until some sudden development quickens the reader’s pulse.

There is a series of delicious twists in the closing chapters to bring a smile to the reader’s face and the satisfaction of relishing a well-resolved tale.

So when I saw The Lincoln Highway, Towles’ third novel, in the best-seller lists before Christmas, there was no need to wonder why. This is another excellent read, as far from Moscow and its aristocrat as you can get.

There is one similarity, insofar as both books are period pieces. The America of the 1950s is almost as far from the average reader’s imagination as the Moscow of the 1920s to 1950s, and both stories are told in a slightly mannered, deliberately old-fashioned style that distinguishes them from and raises them above most contemporary fiction.

I dislike the term literary fiction, with its implicit sneer at mere tellers of tales, but in this case I’ll bow to it as a fitting category for this absorbing novel.

Unlike A Gentleman in Moscow, which spans decades, this story begins in June 1954 and ends inside ten days or so.

In the opening scene 18-year-old Emmett Watson is being driven home to the family farm in the middle of nowhere, Nebraska, from the juvenile detention centre where he has spent the last 18 months.

His crime was the proverbial fatal one punch, delivered in response to goading from a local teenager. Emmett believed he deserved punishment for his unintended killing, and did not defend himself in court.

This is the kind of moral outlook he has, and so in their own very particular ways do the other three main protagonists of this story.

Emmett has a brother, Billy, ten years younger but with the proverbial old head on young shoulders. Because their father has recently died and the bank has foreclosed on the family farm, he intends to drive the Lincoln Highway to San Francisco.

Their mother had abandoned them some years before, but she had sent back postcards from towns along the road to the city by the bay. Billy wants to seek her in these towns; Emmett, who has trained as a carpenter, reckons that San Francisco is the ideal place to buy old houses, do them up, and sell them on.

More than one Irish entrepreneur made his fortune thus in London, and were this book to have the timescale of the Moscow story, we might be looking at an American business saga.

But, spoiler alert, Emmett’s car never once faces west. Two friends from the detention centre have stowed away in the boot of the warden’s car.

Duchess and Woolly (both boys) have a plan to go to the holiday home of Woolly’s wealthy New York family and pick up the $150,000 his grandfather secreted in a safe many years before.

What follows is a kind of Odyssey as the four make their way east, separately and together, as the story unfolds.

There are some of the classic tropes of the American myth, riding the rails in empty wagons, bad people encountered and vanquished, a black World War II veteran named Ulysses who comes to Billy’s aid at a critical juncture.

Multiple points of view move the story along: Emmett, Duchess, Ulysses, and Sally, the neighbour’s daughter who has looked after Billy in the wake of the mother’s departure and the father’s death.

Only two are in the first person, Sally and Duchess, which makes the final chapter all the more of a shock when at last the reader reaches it.

This is a great read, a glimpse back in time to people and places that could have come from a Norman Rockwell painting. Highly recommended.

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