Needless to say it got rave reviews, e.g.
A joke is a joke, but I was entirely with the boring and humourless brother-in-law on that one, when he returns home to find his cellar so unnecessarily depleted. Usually his transgressions are forgivable but I’m afraid I did draw the line when he emptied three bottles of 1928 Margaux down the sink as he needed the empties for an after dinner party trick. It is an ironic plot twist that the only inmate who hadn’t actually committed a criminal offence to get incarcerated, (it emerges that Duchess was framed by his dodgy father), turns out to have the most ambiguous moral compass of all of them. But there we go - that’s the danger these days of Dr. However, if Howard Johnson only opened the first of their famous motels, with their iconic orange roofs and blue steeples, in Georgia in 1954, it seems to me a bit unlikely that by June that year they would be well known as a chain to a recently escaped inmate travelling in Illinois. Their means of transport is Emmett’s rather dented 1948 Studebaker Land Cruiser, which Duchess rather unkindly describes as the sort of car your dentist’s wife would drive to bingo. Towles quickly assembles a cast of interesting characters and each chapter is told from their individual vantage points, usually in the third person, but in the case of Duchess, the son of a failed Shakespearean actor, in the first person. The title refers to the first road route across the USA from Times Square in New York City to Lincoln Park in San Francisco, opened in 1913 and spanning 3,389 miles. Instead they are joined by a couple of the other inmates, who have escaped in the boot of the sheriff’s car, and have different ideas.
However, needless to say nothing goes to plan. The plan is for Emmett and his precocious little brother Billy, 8, to relocate from Nebraska to Texas. And instead of being set over more than three decades the new one is set over just 10 days in June 1954.Įmmett, 18, is released early from a short sentence in a juvenile correctional facility, for involuntary manslaughter, as his father has died and the bank is foreclosing on their farm. Īs the hero of the last one was under house arrest in a posh hotel, I was worried about how Towles would cope with the resulting plot constrictions, but this one is an on the road caper so no worries on that score. Amor Towles’ second novel, “A Gentleman in Moscow”, was superb, so I was rather looking forward to this, his third, “The Lincoln Highway”.
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