The Lincoln Highway (2022) by Amor Towles

Book Review

The Lincoln Highway (2022)

by Amor Towles

    This was our book club pick this month.  I look forward to book club as an opportunity to read the popular bangers that I would normally avoid like the plague.  It's interesting readying books that have big sales numbers as long as I have an acceptable excuse.  Towles, to me, is in the same category as James Patterson and John Grisham- he spend close to twenty years as an investment banker before publishing his first novel, The Rules of Civility, in 2011.  The Rules of Civility was a modest success, i.e. it only has 12,000 Amazon reviews, vs. 42,000 for A Gentleman in Moscow and 43,000 already for this book.   A Gentleman in Moscow, 2016, was a monster hit and it really set the table for The Lincoln Highway, which arrived in fall of 2021 to universal acclaim and monster sales figures.

   It is unclear to me if Towles is serious enough to win a Pultizer, but this book has the feel of those mainstream hits that the Pultizer Prize often embraces.  The story involves three juvenile delinquents and the kid brother of one of the three.  They all meet at a juvenile detention facility in Nebraska, despite the fact that two of the three are from New York and have, as far as I can see, no business being at a juvenile lock up facility in Nebraska during the 1950's. 

    One of the three is let out and heads back to his Dad's sad farm- his Dad being one of those "only in literary fiction" types of a New Englander from a wealthy background who decides to become a farmer in Nebraska, only to fail miserably.  Do people like that exist in real life?   Needless to say, hi-jinks ensue, including a hobo style train journey to New York, multiple adventures inside and outside the environs of New York, and a quest to retrieve a half million dollars from inside a locked safe inside the palatial "cabin" of the deceased grandfather of one of the three former inmates.