The Lincoln Highway

I came to this one after A Gentleman in Moscow, expecting something similarly contained. A hotel, a count, a long slow stay in one place. The Lincoln Highway looked like the opposite promise. A road book, four boys, ten days in June 1954, a Studebaker pointed at California. What hooked me early was how fast that promise breaks. They never get west. They go east, and the book is happy to let the map flip.

Emmett Watson is eighteen when the warden drives him home to Morgen, Nebraska. He had been sent to the juvenile work farm at Salina, Kansas after a fight at the fairgrounds. Jimmy Snyder had been needling him about his father, Emmett swung once, Jimmy fell and hit his head and died. Emmett owned what he did in court and took the sentence. Then his father, Charlie Watson, died of cancer while he was inside, and Emmett got an early release to come home and look after his eight year old brother Billy.

Home is already half gone. Charlie farmed without much success, borrowed, fell behind, and the bank is foreclosing. The house is quiet in the way houses get when an adult has been sick for a while. Mr. Ransom, a neighboring rancher, has been checking in. His daughter Sally, who lost her own mother young, has been feeding Billy and keeping the place straight. She cooks, cleans, mends, and does it with a plain pride in doing things properly. One of her lines that stays with me is the idea that kindness starts where necessity stops. She lives it.

Billy is the surprise engine of the whole novel. Eight, precise about rules, carrying a blue tobacco tin of silver dollars, a flashlight, a compass, a folded road map, and a worn copy of Professor Abacus Abernathe's Compendium of Heroes, Adventurers and Other Intrepid Travellers. After Charlie dies, Billy finds a box with postcards from their mother, who left years before. The cards trace west along the Lincoln Highway, the old coast to coast road from Times Square to San Francisco. Billy decides she will be at the fireworks in San Francisco on the Fourth of July, because she loved fireworks. He wants to follow her route to find her.

Emmett's plan is practical. He trained as a carpenter's helper and wants no part of weather gambling on a farm. He spends a morning in the library with the encyclopedia, compares growing cities, and picks California over Texas because work flipping small houses looks steadier there. He has his father's blue 1948 Studebaker Land Cruiser, his pride, plus a little cash Charlie left hidden and a torn page from Emerson with an apology note. The idea is simple. Collect Billy, drop any loose ends, drive west before the bank locks the door for good.

Two boys in the trunk

The loose ends have other ideas. When Warden Ackerly drives off after dropping Emmett home, Emmett finds Daniel Hewett, called Duchess, and Wallace Wolcott Martin, called Woolly, curled in the trunk. They were fellow inmates at Salina. They slipped in during the drive and rode all the way to Nebraska.

Duchess is talk and spark from the first minute. His father Harrison Hewett was a traveling actor who did Shakespeare in vaudeville houses between cons, and Duchess grew up around applause and lies in equal measure. Harrison left him at St. Nicholas, a home for boys, when he was eight. Duchess later got framed for a theft and landed in Salina. He tells stories constantly, borrows phrases from plays, admires escape artists, and talks about settling accounts between people, as if every wrong creates a debt you have to pay back before you can sleep well. He wants to open a restaurant one day. Sister Agnes, who knew him young, saw decency in him that never got room to grow. Townhouse, another Salina boy, puts it more bluntly later. Duchess can be loyal in his own odd way, and he can also barrel ahead without seeing what is right beside him.

Woolly is different money, different trouble. He grew up wealthy on the Upper East Side, one of several siblings, with a kind older sister Sarah who understands him better than the rest. He got bounced from boarding school after boarding school. At one he set a thesaurus on fire on the football field and the goalposts caught. At another he drove a fire engine back to the station as a helpful gesture while the crew was in a store, so they missed a stable fire. He was declared unfit for now to handle his trust, and his great grandfather left a stack of cash, one hundred fifty thousand dollars, in a wall safe at the family camp in upstate New York. Woolly remembers stories about his family with total clarity and forgets danger completely. He uses pills too much and trusts too fast.

Emmett tells them the plan is Omaha and goodbye. He will give them a lift that far and keep going west with Billy. Then they stop near Duchess's old foster home and the car disappears. Duchess and Woolly take the Studebaker and point it toward New York. Duchess has old scores and old stories there. Woolly has the safe and the camp. For Emmett, who has almost nothing left in Nebraska, losing the car is losing the plan.

Before that theft, there is a hard scene back in town. The brother of Jimmy Snyder finds Emmett and punches him in the street. Emmett takes it and does not swing back, hoping refusal will close the account. Later a younger boy who had egged the fight on gets a beating from Duchess. The two moments sit side by side on purpose. Emmett trying to absorb and end violence. Duchess paying it out with interest.

East instead of west

So the California trip becomes a chase in the wrong direction. Emmett and Billy cannot buy the car back, so they hop freights east to get it back themselves. Towles, who published the book with Viking in 2021 and sets it over ten tight days, tells this middle stretch from several angles. Emmett's chapters run in third person, steady and worried. Duchess talks straight at you in first person, funny and slippery. Woolly drifts in third person too, sweet and scattered. The chapters count down from Ten to One, which gives even small delays a clock.

On the rails they meet Ulysses Dixon, a Black veteran in his forties who rode with the 92nd Infantry Division in Italy in World War Two. His wife Macie never forgave him for enlisting, moved away with their baby son, and Ulysses never found his way back to them. He rides boxcars town to town, works when he can, and watches out for kids because he knows what lonely travel can cost. On one ride he steps between Billy and Pastor John, a predatory man who targets boys on the trains. It is a brief, ugly encounter, and Ulysses handles it without turning it into a speech. He becomes a kind of guard for Billy, and later Billy's stories about heroes start to include him.

Billy on the road is a joy to read when Towles lets him be eight instead of a mascot. He times things with his watch, checks the compass, refolds the map, rereads the Compendium, and sorts the world into heroes and trials. He knows Achilles and Zorro and shipwrecked sailors from Abernathe's pages, and he applies those plots to Nebraska grain elevators and rail yards with total seriousness. He is a stickler about rules, as Emmett says, which makes him brave in odd ways. He will walk up and ask a direct question while older boys posture. He keeps counting his silver dollars. He keeps the postcards dry.

Sally and Mr. Ransom anchor the Nebraska pages. Mr. Ransom took Billy in after Charlie died and Emmett was away. Sally feeds them, packs food for the road, and tells Emmett plainly that she will wait or will not wait, but she will not be strung along. I liked that Towles gives her backbone instead of making her a patient farm girl who only exists to wave at the train. Her care has limits. That felt true.

A fair complaint starts here and never fully leaves. Coincidence does a lot of work. The right freight, the right meeting, the right story remembered at the right time. Billy remembering a family anecdote that cracks a safe is the big one later, but smaller ones pile up on the rails and in the city. If you need every connection to feel earned, the middle will test you. I found it easier to read these chapters as tall tales Billy himself would love, where meetings arrive like chapters in the Compendium, rather than as strict realism.

New York detours

Duchess does not go straight to the camp. He detours to the home of former warden Ackerly and hits him with a cast iron pan, settling an old Salina score in the ugliest way. Then in the city he looks up Townhouse, the inmate who got caught and beaten after Duchess talked him into sneaking out to a movie years before. Duchess blames himself for that beating and asks Townhouse to hit him back to clear it. Townhouse punches him three times while Duchess stands and takes it. It mirrors Emmett taking a punch back in Nebraska, except Duchess stages his like theater. That staging is the point. He needs witnesses, even if the witness is himself.

Emmett tracks them through stories Duchess told at Salina about his father's old talent agents. That leads to a Brooklyn circus, a funny and slightly sad sequence where show people remember Harrison Hewett better than his son would like. Duchess, thrilled to be found, tries to make peace by paying for Emmett to spend time with a prostitute. Emmett goes along, awkward and young, and the scene lands as embarrassment more than initiation. Towles does not linger or leer. He lets it sit as one more way Duchess confuses generosity with control.

The city chapters widen the cast in ways I enjoyed more than the chase. Professor Abernathe, the real author behind Billy's beloved book, meets Billy and is delighted by him. Abernathe grew up as Sam, fell for shipwrecks and explorers as a boy, built a life writing about brave travelers, and had stopped traveling himself. Meeting Billy and hearing about Ulysses nudges him to consider one last adventure of his own. His line about storytellers forgetting that life was the point all along could have sounded cute. In context, with an old man looking at a boy who still believes maps lead to mothers, it earned its place.

Sarah Witney, Woolly's sister, gets fewer pages than she deserves but uses them well. She is married, clear eyed, and the only one in the family who apologized to Woolly and meant it. Her view is that a good trait in excess can wreck a life, which is her gentle way of describing Woolly's sweetness and impulsiveness. Dennis, her husband, hovers at the edges. The Upper East Side rooms feel cold after boxcars and circus lots, which is intentional. Money has not made the Martins safe. It has made them careful in the wrong places.

New York itself is drawn with affection for 1954 surfaces. Diners, subways, parks, doormen, newspaper men, parish halls. Towles likes menus, clothes, street names, and small rituals of politeness. Sometimes that slows the chase. A meal gets described when you want the safe opened. A side character gets a full past when you want Emmett to catch up. I did not mind as much here as I feared I would, because the city is where Duchess is most himself, half charming and half dangerous, and Towles clearly enjoys watching him work a room.

Woolly's house and the safe

The camp is the payoff everyone has been walking toward. A big family house in the woods, shuttered rooms, old furniture under sheets, a lake out back with a dock and a rowboat. Woolly leads them to the wall safe where the cash waits. Duchess has no combination and spends hours trying to force it, sweating, joking less with each hour. When Emmett and Billy arrive, Billy listens to Woolly retell family stories and picks out the numbers hidden inside them. Dates, names, small jokes Woolly's great grandfather used. The door opens. The money is there.

It should feel triumphant and it does for about a page. Then Woolly is found dead upstairs in a bedroom, having taken his own life. Towles handles it quietly. No long explanation, no staged farewell note read aloud. The sadness comes from how ordinary the house keeps being. Sheets on chairs, light on water, cash counted on a table while a brother figure lies upstairs. Sarah's earlier worry hangs over it. Woolly had been declared unfit to receive his trust for reasons that looked like snobbery until you saw how easily he could be steered and how hard he chased a good feeling.

What happens to the money matters less than what it does to the group. Emmett still wants west, still wants work and a small house and school for Billy. Duchess still wants a shared future, a restaurant, a gang that stays together. Billy wants his mother and his heroes to line up. The cash could fund all of it or poison all of it. Towles lets them argue around it without turning them into economists. They are tired boys in a rich house, and tired boys make blunt choices.

I want to note a second fair criticism here, because it bothered me more on reflection than in the moment. Woolly reads as lovable and doomed from his first long scene, and the book leans on that doom for pathos without giving him many pages where he is competent or private. Sarah sees him clearly. Ulysses treats him gently. But Woolly's own chapters often use him for humor or plot keys, the safe story, the trust story, rather than letting him want something that is not suggested by Duchess. His death then feels fated in a way that lets the other boys off too easily. Your mileage may vary. For me it was the one stretch where Towles's warmth felt like steering.

What the ten days cost

The end comes fast after the slow camp hours. Emmett and Duchess fight, old debts and fresh thefts tangled together. Emmett leaves Duchess unconscious in the rowboat on the lake to buy time for a clean start west with Billy. The boat leaks. Duchess cannot swim. He cannot keep it afloat and he drowns, his mind drifting toward applause and a Shakespearean stage, with a strange late tenderness toward Emmett. Earlier Duchess had put Emmett adrift in a different way by stealing the car. Now Emmett returns the image literally. Towles does not excuse it. He presents it as a panicked choice by an exhausted eighteen year old who has been robbed, chased, and cornered, and he lets it stain the escape.

People will argue about blame, and they should. Duchess did cruel things and paid some back and kept score in a way that made new debts. Emmett tried to be decent and still chose abandonment when he saw no other door. Woolly paid most and chose least. Billy watched and learned that heroes in books survive trials while boys on lakes do not always. Ulysses keeps moving. Abernathe decides to move at last. Sally stays in Nebraska with her clear terms. Sarah mourns a brother the family never knew how to hold. The ten days do not produce a clean moral. They produce survivors with cash, a car, grief, and a map that no longer points where they thought.

As a reading experience, the last hundred pages pulled me through even where I objected. The countdown structure pays off, the short chapters clip along, and Billy's faith holds the center when the older boys wobble. Towles is generous to minor characters without losing the thread, and his sentences stay readable when the plot gets dark. If you loved the Metropol's closed world in his earlier novel, this open road may feel baggy at first. Towns, trains, circuses, mansions, lakes. It is a lot of scenery. I missed the compression of the hotel for about a third, then stopped missing it.

Who should pick it up. Readers who like character driven historical fiction set in America in the 1950s, boys on the road, found families that fail and reform, and stories about stories. Billy's Compendium will charm anyone who grew up on myths and adventure tales. Ulysses will stay with anyone who likes quiet decency over speeches. Duchess will entertain and irritate in equal measure, which seems to be the intent. Who should skip or shelve it for later. Readers who want tight crime logic, readers who need every coincidence justified, readers who find long detours into meals and manners trying. At five hundred seventy six pages in the Viking hardcover, it takes its time. Some dinners could have been shorter. Some arrivals could have been harder.

What stayed with me was not the highway. It was Billy checking his watch and refolding his map while older boys argued about money, and Sally packing food she could not afford to waste, and Ulysses standing where a boy needed a wall. Emmett wanted California because an encyclopedia told him houses were rising there. He learned what Billy knew from postcards. You go looking for one person and find the people around you instead.