Why this Book: Selected by my literature reading group, based on 1. strong recommendations from a couple who’d read it, and 2. our group had loved Towles book A Gentleman in Moscow. Several had also read his Rules of Civility and spoken highly of it. 

Summary in 2 Sentences:  The Lincoln Highway was  the first trans-continental highway in the US, and the book begins in 1954 when a group of young men decide to travel the highway from Nebraska to California.  However it turns out that each of the young men have different agendas for making the trip, and as things evolve, these different agendas define the characters, define the trip on which they have embarked, and create a much different adventure than any of them had counted on.  

My Impressions:  An enjoyable, easy and interesting book to read – I’ve described it as “comfort food” reading; Towles style is engaging, and the characters are interesting, believable and fun to follow.   The perspective changes with every chapter – the chapter titles are the names of the characters from whose perspective the story is told in that chapter. Only three of the characters tell their story in first person; the others are told in the third person with a “God’s eye” view.  This varied narrative technique is at first a bit awkward, but as I got used to it, it provided a nice change.

The story begins with Emmett, an 18 year old young man returning home to his farm from Reform school/juvenile work camp to which he was sent for having inadvertently killed another young man in a fight.  Emmet’s father has died, his younger brother Billy had been cared for by Sally, a young woman on a neighboring farm, and the farm is about to be foreclosed.  Emmett has no intention of being a farmer, signs the farm over to the bank and is about to embark with brother Billy on a trip to California in Emmett’s Studebaker to find their mother, when two of Emmett’s pals show up, having escaped from the reform school where they were Emmett’s pals, and they decide to accompany Emmett on the trip. Emmett reluctantly agrees, believing he has put the necessary caveats in place – but then things start going a bit awry.  

Now the group leaving Morgen Nebraska is no longer Billy and Emmett, but three young men and a boy, and Emmett begins to lose control of his careful and deliberate and fairly well thought-out plan.   The trip (and the book) then embarks on a variety of branches and sequels from the original plan, and it reminds me of the old insight:   Do you want to hear Gold laugh?  Tell him your plans! 

Key Characters

• Emmett A practical quiet and thoroughly competent and honest young man, who is confident in himself and his pragmatic abilities to plan and get things done.
• Duchess A charismatic character full of charm and self confidence but who sees immediate advantages without thinking through long term possibilities, risks or consequences.  Basically honest and honorable, with a rather primitive sense of justice and fairness, but a dream of getting rich the easy way.
• Billy  An eight year old boy, a precocious and idealistic dreamer, always asking questions, who trusts and believes in the good in people.
• Woolly – A dreamy distracted type who has almost no common sense, but not an evil or selfish bone in his body.  Loves to listen to commercials on the radio.
• Ulysses  An African American man, a loner, honest and good,  who befriends and protects Billy.  Ulysses is adrift in America, riding the rails since returning from WW2 and finding his wife and child gone, and he has no idea where they are or how to find them. He is running from the sadness at his decision to leave them and go to war. 
• The Pastor A so-called man of God who uses the scripture to justify whatever he can get away with.  A conniver whose one goal is to feather his own nest.  
• Sally A confident young woman who insists on order and cleanliness, always insists on the reasonable and practical solution, religious in her values, and confident in her prejudices. She abhors chaos and demands an explanation for anything that is out of the ordinary.  Her mothering instinct is completely at odds with the spontaneous chaos that follows the four boys.  
• Other significant characters who don’t get their own chapters would be  Townhouse – an African American pal of Emmet’s who they seek out in Harlem; Sister Agnes, who ran the Christian orphanage where Duchess went to school; , The Professor, who wrote the book that inspired Billy and Ulysses; Dennis, Wooly’s brother-in-law who is a self-righteous and ambitious social climber;  Sarah Wooly’s sister, who recognizes Woolly’s strengths and weaknesses and loves him. 

The real charm in this book is in the diversity and idiosyncrasies of the characters, as we get to know them.  Each of them remind me of someone I have known.   They are interesting, funny, frustrating,  have notable strengths balanced by notable flaws – distinctly human. The Pastor is perhaps the only character without redeeming virtues. 

In the course of the branches and sequels that emerge from the original plan to drive across America on the Lincoln Highway, there are some wonderful stories told, and the characters have some memorable conversations.  A few examples: 

• Emmett talks about how his father always used “mollifying” words, to reduce the seriousness of whatever calamities were befalling him or his family. Emmett never trusted those mollifying words. Things were always worse than his father made them out to be. 
• Emmett didn’t like preachers because “half the time it seemed like a preacher was trying to sell you something you didn’t need; and the other half, he was selling you something you already had.”  p126
• Emmett and Billy  “Emmett figured rules were a necessary evil. They were an inconvenience to be abided for having the privilege of living in an orderly world.  But when it came to rules, Billy wasn’t simply an abider. He was a stickler.”  p145
• Woolly loved the Dictionary, but hated the Thesaurus. “How was one to communicate an idea to another person if when one had something to say, one could choose from ten different words for every word in a sentence?” p 290  It appalled him that the same event could be referred to as a fire, a blaze, or a conflagration.
• Duchess’s description of Howard Johnson’s: “The cuisine was a gussied-up version of what you’d find in a diner and the defining characteristic of the clientele was that with a single glance you could tell more about them than you wanted to know.” p180   
• Duchess’s insight that “when circumstance conspire to spoil your carefully laid plans with an unexpected reversal, the best thing you can do is take credit as quickly as possible” p406
• Ulysses to the Professor: “I believe everything of value in this life must be earned…because those who are given something of value without having earned it are bound to squander it.” p421
• The Professor: “Then surely, I am among the squanderers. One who has lived his life in the third person and the past tense. So let me start by acknowledging that anything I say to you, I say with the utmost humility.” p422
• Woolly’s word for not noticing or overlooking something important or beautiful an “undersight.”  p415
• Woolly’s distinction between his brother-in-law Dennis who felt morally obligated to “sit you down and set you straight,” and the Professor whose kind demeanor indicated that he was “not the sort who would want to sit you down and set you straight…not the sort to hurry you along because time was money, or of the essence or a stitch in nine, or what have you.”  p417

In considering my favorite characters in the book I’d begin with Duchess – a quintessential “artful dodger,” such a clever showman and extravert, trying to be honorable, but unable to overcome his dream to ultimately be the big cheese on easy street.  Next I’d list Ulysses, so sincere, so strong, so powerful and suffering so.  Then the Professor, old, wise and sincere, ready to take a chance and learn, whose humble efforts as an academic had made such an impression on Billy and certainly many others. Then Billy, who found his ideals in the Professor’s book of heroes and did all he could to live up to those ideals. who saw the best in people, but was ready to act when he was wrong.  And finally Woolly, probably somewhere on the spectrum, but good, innocent, well- meaning, wise in his own impractical way – reminds me of “the fool on the hill” in the famous Beatles song.  

Not to be overlooked in describing the merits of this book is Towles writing – smooth as butter, easy to read and follow. Additionally there is a nice retrospective to America in the early 1950s, not long after WWII and just after the Korean War.   America coming back to life again, full of confidence and possibilities, but also facing different versions of the challenges we face today – people struggling, not trusting nor being trustworthy, many taking whatever shortcuts they can find, and others doing their best to be good citizens,  trying to find their way in a confusing world, where things just don’t seem to go as planned – like a trip across America on The Lincoln Highway. .