Sadly, for these boys, it is only a matter of time before they find themselves in the correctional facility at Topeka, or worse.

Whatever values or ambitions we try to instill in them will, in all likelihood, be cast aside the moment they walk out from under our gaze. They're boys who were never given much sense of right or wrong as children, and who see little reason for learning it now. For some of the young men who come to Salina, he began, whatever series of events has brought them under our sphere of influence is just the beginning of a long journey through a life of trouble. He had notions that he'd gathered from books and experience, and he had plenty of words at his disposal to turn them into counsel. But Warden Williams was a modern man with a master's degree and good intentions and a framed photograph of Franklin D. When Emmett had first arrived at Salina, the warden was a Hoosier named Ackerly, who wasn't inclined to put into words a piece of advice that could be delivered more efficiently with a stick. Those hoping for the classic road trip novel that the book’s blurb, endpapers, and cover promise it to be will be disappointed as Towles instead decides to ditch the intended plot for a lengthy and laborious cat-and-mouse storyline that takes up the entire novel.That Warden Williams had something to say, didn't come as much of a surprise. The highway itself acts as nothing more than a MacGuffin, or a device that motivates the plot but ends up being entirely irrelevant to the work. After enlisting his younger brother, the precocious Billy, all goes awry when two of Emmett’s friends, stowaways from the work farm, turn up with a plan regarding a safety deposit box, $150,000, and an eye set in the opposite direction: New York.Īs the reader will quickly realise, The Lincoln Highway is not the novel that it purports to be. Our main character, Emmett Watson, fresh from a stint on a juvenile work farm, hatches a plan to retrace the route his mother took along the Lincoln Highway when she disappeared to California years before.

Even the title itself, a reference to the first transcontinental highway to traverse the United States, conjures images of red deserts, of straight-as-an-arrow roads, of Buicks and Cadillacs, of sea to shining sea, of Henry Fonda, of Stars and Stripes forever and ever. The Lincoln Highway offers us a thick slice of Americana. Haunting the bestseller charts for years, it surely provided its author, Amor Towles, with the stability of never having to write an earnest word ever again in his life. A Gentleman in Moscow was one of those novels where to describe it as a bestseller is truly an understatement.

Books like the lincoln highway