Guest review by Mary Hoffman: THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY by Amor Towles

 

"It is impossible to describe the last, climactic, section without giving spoilers so I will just say it is unexpected and you will race through those pages and, if you are like me, immediately want to re-read them."

Mary Hoffman’s first book, a YA novel, was published in 1975. Since then she has written 125 books, mainly for children and teenagers but also a couple of adult novels under pseudonyms. After graduating in English Literature from Cambridge and spending a couple of years studying Linguistics at UCL, Mary wrote courses for the Open University for five years but then went freelance. Mary’s books have been translated into 31 languages and have won prizes; she also runs the popular History Girls blog. Mary lives in West Oxfordshire with her husband. They are currently catless but not for long. In 2025 her big book for children about food, Food for All, is published by Otter-Barry Books and the new Writers Review Publishing is reissuing her adult novel, David: the Unauthorised Autobiography, the story of the model for Michelangelo’s famous statue in Florence.

The thing about Amor Towles is that, like so many excellent novelists writing currently, all his books are different. I came across him first when my Book Club chose his A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) as its title for the month’s discussion. It was one of those rare novels which everyone in the group loved, including me.

I then sought out Rules of Civility (2011) which was unrecognisable as by the same author, even though it was good in a different way. Gentleman was the very unusual story of a Russian aristocrat five years after the 1917’s revolution who, as an alternative to execution, is confined to lifelong house arrest in the Hotel Metropol. He has lost his liberty but, thanks to some clever sleight of hand, not his fortune.

Civility has more of a Scott Fitzgerald feel, though set in the late ‘30s in Manhattan. And then, five years later, came The Lincoln Highway, quite different again.

The novel begins when Emmett Watson, aged eighteen is released from Salina, a work farm for juvenile offenders, after involuntarily causing the death of a contemporary who was taunting and provoking him. The Warden of the detention centre drives him “home” to his father’s farm in Nebraska. But what is home? Emmett’s mother disappeared years ago, his father has died and the bank is foreclosing on the farm.

What makes it home is Emmett’s little brother Billy, who has a plan for what they should do next – set off in Emmett’s car to drive to California and find their mother. We don’t know if this would have worked because it is disrupted before it begins. Two other inmates from Salina have stowed away in the Warden’s boot and these two complete the quartet that go on the weirdest road trip ever.

There is Duchess, a charming but unreliable teenager who turns out to have an alarming approach to restorative justice, and a very rich boy who has just reached his majority, who has problems concentrating. Together they, but mainly Duchess, persuade Emmett that they need to head east before they hit the Lincoln Highway west. Duchess has scores to settle and Woolly has an inheritance to collect.

The four boys don’t always stay together, largely due to the unpredictability and hazy morality of Duchess, whose approach to justice is somewhat haphazard. This gives Towles the opportunity to develop adventures which used to be called “picaresque.” A large cast of characters encounter our heroes together and severally. Emmett is completely focussed on getting his car, “borrowed” by Duchess, back, Billy keeps the main goal of finding their mother at the forefront of his mind but is distracted by comparing the people he meets with his Compendium of Heroes, a book he treasures in his backpack.

Duchess and Woolly are harder to read. They are both traumatised and we have to read on to find out how and why. The book is organised into ten sections, maddeningly beginning at 10 and counting down to 1, even though the story travels forward in a linear direction. In each section there are parts told from the points of view of the four main characters and some minor ones, though only Duchess’s are in the first person. Paradoxically, he is the character whose motives and actions are hardest to decipher.

He appears to be on a campaign of retribution, rather than justice, of which the confrontation with the father who abandoned him as a child should be the climax. But Towles swerves their actual meeting. We know it has happened and perhaps Emmett has guessed what form it took but a lot is left to the reader to infer.

At the end, the four boys are together again in Woolly’s family’s mansion by a lake in the Adirondacks. It is impossible to describe the last, climactic, section without giving spoilers so I will just say it is unexpected and you will want to race through those pages and, if you are like me, immediately want to re-read them.

It is full of memorable characters, especially Duchess and Billy, though it feels sometimes as if the author is deliberately creating them to be idiosyncratic. That and what I can only feel is a plot hole at the end, in spite of several re-readings, make it not quite the masterpiece thar A Gentleman in Moscow is but I applaud Towles’ determination to write something completely different. By my reckoning the next novel should be out next year; I can’t wait.

The Lincoln Highway is published by Penguin.  

Mary has also reviewed A Gentleman in Moscow.