The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles
In June 1954, the warden of the juvenile work farm where Emmett Watson, then 18 years old, had recently completed a fifteen-month sentence for involuntary homicide, drove him back to Nebraska. Emmett plans to travel to California with his brother Billy, age 8, so they can begin a new life there after losing their mother and father, respectively, and the family farm to bank foreclosure. Nevertheless, as the warden pulls away, Emmett notices that two of his work-farm friends had snuck inside the car’s trunk. They have come up with a completely new strategy for Emmett’s future, one that will send them all on a perilous voyage in the opposite direction—to the City of New York.
The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles
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The Watson brothers, Emmett, who was 18 at the time, and Billy, his younger brother, were the two main characters in this work of fiction. It was June 1954, and the setting was a bankrupt farm in rural Nebraska. After Emmett’s father passed away from cancer, the decision was made to let him go so that he could go back home and take care of his younger brother. Emmett had been serving a sentence at a boy’s reformatory for his role in the inadvertent death of a neighbourhood bully. While the bank was putting together the paperwork to foreclose on the family home, Billy had been staying with neighbours while he awaited his brother’s arrival. The Watsons’ friend Sally, who is 19 years old, and her father were the next-door neighbours.
Sally was quite direct to the point of being resentful of her lot in life, which seemed to be caring for her father until another guy for her to care for would appear. But, she loved Billy with the ferocity of a mother hen guarding her sole chick. Emmett, who had been completing his time on a farm in Salina, Kansas, was being taken back to Nebraska by the reformatory warden when the narrative began.
Emmett intended to pick up his brother, spend one or two more days in the farmhouse, and then travel to Texas with Billy where he planned to make a fortune through the purchase, renovation, and sale of homes, all of which would be financed by the $3,000 secret nest egg that their father had hidden from the bank’s creditors. Billy, however, had other plans. A stash of mother-written postcards that their father had hidden from the boys after she left the household several years prior had been discovered by him. The cards’ postmarks and comments revealed that their mother had left the family and was on her way to California along the Lincoln Highway, the country’s first transcontinental paved thoroughfare.
(The Lincoln Highway connected Lincoln Park in San Francisco to Times Square in New York City. The farm of the Watsons was about halfway along the road.) Billy, who was only a newborn when their mother departed, however, was more interested in reuniting with her than Emmett. Finally, he persuaded Emmett that California was expanding more quickly than Texas and would be a better location for his home improvement plans.
But as the warden and Emmett were getting ready to leave Salina and go for Nebraska, Duchess and Woolly, two other young men who were serving time at the prison in Salina with Emmett, showed up at the Watson’s farm after having stowed away in the trunk of the warden’s car. As the itinerant vaudeville performer’s kid, Duchess spent much of his childhood travelling in and around New York City.
Woolly was the child of a wealthy New York family. Duchess, a seductive manipulator and planner, asked Emmett to take them to New York so Woolly could access a sum of money (in this case, $150,000) that his grandfather had placed in the family safe as a “trust fund.” They would divide the trust three ways if Emmett drove them, and Emmett would be well on his way to becoming a significant homebuilder in California.
Emmett, who believed he was considerably more intelligent than the other two former reformatory inmates, initially declined, but he ultimately consented to make the extra effort to drive the escapees to Omaha’s railway station so they could catch a train for New York City. The Watson brothers were left stranded in rural Nebraska by Duchess and Woolly as they left for New York as they were travelling to Omaha. Emmett had managed to divert himself from another of Duchess’s follies long enough for Duchess to “steal” his car.
Sally responded to Emmett’s call and drove them to the Omaha railway station, where Emmett planned to board a train and travel to New York City to retrieve his automobile. But, Emmett discovered his money, the nest egg of $3,000, after Sally left them at the train station. It was still in his car’s trunk, hidden beneath the spare tire. He identified an express freight train travelling to New York City after doing some thorough investigation, and he and Billy hid in a boxcar.
From there, Emmett and Billy Watson set out on a journey that was filled with unique experiences and run-ins with people who were eerily similar to those Huck and Jim encountered when paddling their raft down the Mississippi in a bygone period.
The Lincoln Highway is a character-driven drama that moves forward thanks to the narrators of each significant character. Readers can have a more complete understanding of what is actually happening because of the way it is presented, which also heightens the story’s suspense.
