“Lincoln Highway” Heads in a Different Direction

posted in: Good Reads: Fiction | 0

I probably would have read anything that came out by Amor Towles. That his third book was titled The Lincoln Highway made it inescapable. I, who had read about Carl Fisher and the Lincoln Highway, Cy Avery and Route 66, the transcontinental firsts of Horatio Jackson and Alice Ramsay, knew I must read this apparent paean to the American road. That theĀ  story was set in 1954 and not 1924 discomfited me but little. A road trip west on the historic first transcontinental highway which took twenty-two years to see its way to paved completion: I was all in. Except Towles’s latest book didn’t turn out to be that at all. The characters don’t even drive on the Lincoln Highway, at least not in a westerly direction or for very long. Most of the book takes place in New York City. And the protagonists get there by rail–hopping a freight car–not road.

Is this is Amor Towles’s idea of a literary joke? His title is complete deception, like a magician’s misdirection, except the I didn’t sit down for a magic trick. The flapping white dove he pulled from his cape was impressive and all, but it is not exactly what I signed on for. I felt a little bit had–pleased and had, but had all the same.

I’m creating my own misdirection: I loved the deception. I loved feeling had. I was a little bit in awe of his audacity, a little breathless at the novelty.

The Lincoln Highway

The skill with which Towles limns his characters is no joke. And of all the colorful characters ins this book, none is as original or as endearing as eight-year-old Billy. Unusually gifted, Billy has read Abacus Abernathy’s Compendium of Heroes, Adventurers, and Other Intrepid Travelers twenty-four times as the novel begins (twenty-five by the time it ends). The book tells the condensed stories of mythical and historical heroes in twenty-six chapters from Achilles to Zorro, leaving eight blank pages for reader to record the story of his own adventures. Taking his cue from Homer and others, Billy determines to start is story in medias res. Where is that middle of the story? After consideration, he places it (unsurprisingly) exactly where Towles started his, in the first chapter of the novel, which he labels “Ten.” For my part, I couldn’t help thinking it would come at the novel’s end, just as Billy, Emmett, and Sally are about to start out from Times Square on the Lincoln Highway: to seek their fortune–and possibly their mother–in California. Again, Towles makes his reader wonder.

There is another deception he commits in the person of one of his characters, a deception that is more discomfiting than a mere misleading title. Towles tells his story from multiple points of view: Billy, Emmett, Duchess, Woollie and several secondary characters, as well. Only Duchess gets the first person, and, as such, his voice comes through loud and clear. It is an appealing voice, street-toughened but as loyal a friend as you are likely to meet. From Sister Agnes in the orphanage, he has learned a kind of Newtonian law of justice, an accounting which requires that offences be paid back at par. By his accounting, the insouciant instigator of Emmett’s beating deserves a payback. So Duchess whacks him upside the head with a two-by-four. Warden Ackerly owes big for his mistreatment of the juvenile inmates at Salina. So, Duchess hits the sleeping ex-warden over the head with a frying pan. Duchess is nothing if not scrupulous in his accounting. He travels uptown to Harlem so he can give three uncontested slugs to his chin as payment for his own transgression in Salina.

All this head-bonking and fist-throwing had me reeling, I’ll admit. The image of a young man collapsing under the blow of a piece of lumber–no matter how heinous he had behaved in the previous scene–was hard to take. Ditto the dropped-anvil beaning of a sleeping man, no matter the crimes perpetrated off-stage, as it were, before the action of the book even began. Duchess was clearly a sympathetic character. I wanted to support his actions, but I couldn’t. I agreed with the premise of Sister Agnes’s philosophy but couldn’t carry it to the conclusion Duchess does. Misdeeds may require a reckoning, but we humans can’t know precisely what that reckoning is. The legal system is cumbersome enough. How much more dangerous when individuals appoint themselves judge and jury, too.

I couldn’t figure out what Towles was doing. Was he being manipulative, making us supportive of morally questionable acts because they were carried out by a sympathetic character? Was he being deceptive, giving a false impression to be overturned by later events? It was the latter, but it took the entire book to play out.

In the novel’s final chapters, we see Duchess in an altogether different light. We might have paid more attention to the warning signs. We learn early on he was abandoned by his father for a pretty blonde. We hear Sister Agnes tell Emmett that Duchess needs a friend, needs his friendship. Later T. cautions Emmett from getting too involved with Duchess. He brings trouble in his wake. We learn that his father’s perfidy was worse–much worse–than we could have imagined. Towles gave us more than enough warning that Duchess was damaged goods. Yet still I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe in his ultimate goodness.

Fifty Dollar Bills

This is Towles’s way of showing that “nice is different than good.” Childhood trauma can stick its claws into a person and never let go. For, as much as Duchess has distanced himself from his father, yet he can’t escape his own fatal cupidity. At least, he doesn’t escape it. In the penultimate scene, he beans Emmett with a stone in an effort to secure Woollie’s inheritance. After Emmett comes to, he threatens him and Billy with a rifle. He betrays his friends as his father betrayed him. In the final scene, Duchess chooses fifty-dollar bills over life. He literally sinks his lifeboat to secure the loot, knowing full well he doesn’t know how to swim. It would be comic, if it weren’t so terribly sad.

Thus does Duchess, in the first person, tell of his own demise. Thus does the book’s most comic character leave the reader with a deep sadness, as he turns the final page. Sadness and discombobulation. Why? Why did Towles do this to us? Call the book The Lincoln Highway and assiduously keep his characters from driving on it? Create a comic character whose past dooms him to a very dark ending? Strangely, there is pleasure in the unsettling. Towles knows this, and he pulls it off skillfully.

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