![]() ![]() With the family farm in foreclosure, all that's left for the brothers to do is follow in the footsteps of generations before them: Go West. The boys' father is dead, and a neighbor has been caring for Billy. Emmett, 18, has just returned home to Nebraska after serving a sentence at a juvenile work farm (he accidentally killed another boy in a fight). The story follows the fortunes of two brothers of a familiar type: strong, silent Emmett and innocent, optimistic Billy. Still, "The Lincoln Highway" is a romantic novel, not in a passion-and-courtship sense but in its idealization of the era. The philosophizing does not always spring from the most trustworthy of sources. ![]() Like the highway, the novel is long, and it winds through adventures in the style of an old-fashioned serial, with an abundance of last-second rescues and romantic philosophizing (about the moral caliber of men who can take a punch, codes of honor and the need to "balance the accounts" in life). ![]() Set in 1950s America, "The Lincoln Highway" is a road novel that celebrates the mythos of an era via a cross-country highway, and it delivers an overwhelming blast of nostalgia that many readers will welcome even if it doesn't add anything new to the genre. Amor Towles' follow-up to his bestselling book "A Gentleman in Moscow" arrives on a wave of anticipation, at a time when we long for simpler days. ![]()
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