After loving the author's previous two books, one of which is an all-time favorite of mine, no one's more surprised than me that I didn't end up loving The Lincoln Highway.
Emmett has just been released from a juvenile detention facility after serving time for involuntary manslaughter. Now that his father has passed away and he no longer has family in town, he plans to pick up his little brother and drive along the Lincoln Highway to California so that they can start anew. But his carefully laid plans fall by the wayside when his friends show up and force him to embark on a different journey altogether.
I hate to say it, but this book confused me. I thought Emmett was our protagonist, and I was all ready to cheer him on as he did whatever he needed to do to start a new life, mainly by driving along the Lincoln Highway (hence the name of the book, right?). But this must be a case of mismatched expectations because Emmett wasn't the actual focus of this book and he didn't drive along that namesake road.
Emmett is but one character out of many in this book, and he shares equal limelight with them all. Each of these characters has their points of view and ample time in the book, filled with their corresponding backgrounds and narratives. But the issue is that the tales of these side characters are not vital to the story. You can just cut out their turns and still have essentially the same story overall. So to include them made the whole thing feel bloated and unfocused.
It doesn't help that a bunch of the side characters kept clowning around and getting up to shenanigans throughout the entire book. It almost feels like slapstick comedy, where outrageous things happen just for some laughs. This was especially odd because a lot of the notable events in here were people getting beat up or killed. But there was this incongruous, jokey tone permeating those scenes that didn't really go with whatever horrible event was happening.
That isn't to say this was all bad. I still enjoyed Towles's writing, even if I didn't really connect with the story. He always includes these little bits of wisdom coated in humor, and I gobbled up the Greek mythology references in here, as well as the trip down memory lane to FAO Schwarz. Clearly Towles was paying homage to 1950s Americana, and he does well from the parts I could pick up. But in the end, I just wasn't the right audience for this book, and I hope other readers trying this will have better luck than I did.
Readaroo Rating: 3 stars
This was my Book of the Month pick for October. If you're curious about BOTM or want to find out how to get your first book for $5, click here.
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