The novel probes questions about how to structure a narrative and where to start its chapters count down from Ten to One as they build to a knockout climax. The Lincoln Highway is, among other things, about the act of storytelling and mythmaking. (In another fun connection for Towles nerds, naïve trust funder Wallace 'Woolly' Wolcott Martin is the nephew of Wallace Wolcott from Rules of Civility.)Īuthor Interviews Idea For 'Gentleman In Moscow' Came From Many Nights In Luxury Hotels Shortly after the warden drives off, two fellow inmates turn up, stowaways from the warden's trunk - trouble-maker Duchess and his hapless but sweet protegé, Woolly. (Billy has been ably taken care of by a neighbor's hard-working daughter, Sally, during Emmett's absence she's another terrific character.) The kindly warden who drives Emmett home reminds him that what sent him to the Kansas reformatory was 'the ugly side of chance,' but now he's paid his debt to society and has his whole life ahead of him. When we meet him, Towles' latest hero, Emmett Watson, has been released a few months early from detention in consideration of his father's death, the foreclosure of the family farm, and his responsibility for his 8-year-old brother, Billy. The novel begins on Jand ends on the same date, clearly not coincidentally, as A Gentleman in Moscow.

Like his first two novels, 'The Lincoln Highway' is elegantly constructed and compulsively readable. Mostly confined to a single setting - Moscow's luxurious Metropol Hotel - it spanned 32 years under Stalin's grim rule.

His much-loved second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow(2016), incorporated nods toward the great Russian writers and shades of Eloise at the Plaza and Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel. Scott Fitzgerald and its title from George Washington's Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation. His first novel, Rules of Civility (2011), set among social strivers in New York City in 1936, took its inspiration from F. Again, one of the ideas Towles explores is how evil can be offset by decency and kindness on any rung of the socio-economic ladder. Like his first two novels, The Lincoln Highway is elegantly constructed and compulsively readable. But hitch onto this delightful tour de force and you'll be pulled straight through to the end, helpless against the inventive exuberance of Towles' storytelling. If this book were set today, their constant detours and U-turns would send GPS into paroxysms of navigational recalculations. Amor Towles' new Great American Road Novel tails four boys - three 18-year-olds who met in a juvenile reformatory, plus a brainy 8-year-old - as they set out from Nebraska in June, 1954, in an old Studebaker in pursuit of a better future.

The lincoln highway novel