The Lincoln Highway

Emmett’s father wasn’t one to lash out at his children in anger even when they deserved it. In fact, the only time Emmett could remember his father expressing unmitigated ire toward him was when he was sent home from school for defacing a textbook. As his father made painfully clear that night, to deface the pages of a book was to adopt the manner of a Visigoth. It was to strike a blow against that most sacred and noble of man’s achievements—the ability to set down his finest ideas and sentiments so that they might be shared through the ages.

And that mark was likely to stay with him for the rest of his life as a helpful reminder that while the heroes in storybooks are usually figments of the imagination, most of the men who write about them are figments of the imagination too.

• Billy, when looking for Professor Abernathe’s office in the Empire State Building. They eventually found him, rebuking the idea that all heroes are fictional.

How easily we forget—we in the business of storytelling—that life was the point all along. A mother who has vanished, a father who has failed, a brother who is determined. A journey from the prairies into the city by means of a boxcar with a vagabond named Ulysses. Thence to a railroad track suspended over the city as surely as Valhalla is suspended in the clouds. And there, the boy, Ulysses, and he, having sat down by a campfire as ancient as the ways of man, began:

• In the only Abacus (Professor Abernathe) chapter, Abernathe muses on the point of storytelling.

Every bit of evidence would suggest that the will to be moving is as old as mankind […] Any child of ten can tell you that getting-up-and-going is topic number one in the record of man’s endeavors. So, if the will to move is as old as mankind and every child can tell you so, what happens to a man like my father? What switch is flicked in the hallway of his mind that takes the God-given will for motion and transforms it into the will for staying put?

It isn’t due to a loss of vigor. For the transformation doesn’t come when men like my father are growing old and infirm. It comes when they are hale, hearty, and at the peak of their vitality. If you asked them what brought about the change, they will cloak it in the language of virtue. They will tell you that the American Dream is to settle down, raise a family, and make an honest living. They’ll speak with pride of their ties to the community through the church and the Rotary and the chamber of commerce, and all other manner of stay-puttery.

But maybe, I was thinking as I was driving over the Hudson River, just maybe the will to stay put stems not from a man’s virtues but from his vices. After all, aren’t gluttony, sloth, and greed all about staying put? Don’t they amount to sitting deep in a chair where you can eat more, idle more, and want more? In a way, pride and envy are about staying put too. For just as pride is founded on what you’ve built up around you, envy is founded on what your neighbor has built across the street. A man’s home may be his castle, but the moat, it seems to me, is just as good at keeping people in as it is at keeping people out.

All road novels are really about the American Dream – pursuit of it, playing out a human version of the country sprawling it’s probing fingers from sea to shiny sea. The Lincoln Highway reverses that by having the heroes go east in an effort of reclamation (Emmet his car, America it’s past, Wooly his home, Duchess his windfall, Billy an adventure, Sally a love). All the characters are united in their abandonment, how poorly they fit into their current lives like hand-me-down clothes. I think Sally summarizes it well in saying that the American Dream really isn’t about staying put, about building a castle. It’s about venturing forth once more into the breach.

Not sure how we are supposed to read Duchess – he’s a dangerous character, who, when “intent on something, everyone on the periphery was at risk. Whether his intentions now were focused on avoiding Salina, or obtaining the money from the safe, or seeing to the unfinished business with his father, in the heat of the moment Duchess was perfectly capable of doing something as stupid as pulling a trigger.” Even to his dying breath, “the rest is silence”, he doesn’t know himself if he is the villain in Iago or the hero in Hamlet, or whether they both in fact are villainous. His dogged pursuit of the safe’s contents throughout the entire novel allow Emmet and Billy to have the sort of money they need to start a new life. And Emmet effectively dooms him on the boat by making him choose the 50k or his safety, which is another sort of accidental murder on Emmet’s behalf.

Towles has said before that he is not actively building characters as metaphors for larger philosophical ideas. There are no John Everymans, no Willy Lomans, no Pilgrim’s Progress here. But it’s hard not to generalize each character as an aspect of America writ human, of the moralistic conscience, the hedonistic disregard of periphery, the tireless frontier sprawl, the devastating second order effects of immediate violence, the abandonment, the carnage. All characters have lost someone, and their tragedy revolves around America’s birthday of July 4th. All characters are born of that fatalistic day, their journeys starting en media res on some multiple of that day. And they all have been betrayed, either nefariously or accidentally but betrayed all the same, left to carve out their own identities in the bedrock of an uncaring and often hostile wilderness of America.