Book Review: The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

I wish this book had done more for me. After picking A Gentleman in Moscow as my favorite read of 2022, I really wanted to love the rest of Amor Towles’ books.

The Lincoln Highway is about a band of misfits who leave juvenile detention (both illegally and legally) with various intentions, some to cross the United States and others to exact revenge. It is a sweet story about family, consequences, and loyalty, but it didn’t hit the mark.

One of the main reasons why I loved A Gentleman in Moscow so much was because of its creativity and ingenuity. The idea of a prissy Russian aristocrat getting trapped in a hotel for the remainder of his life is an instantly hilarious premise, and Towles makes it touching and intelligent as well. In this book, he inexplicably chooses the boring, overdone trope of jailbirds on the run.

Boredom was the recurring issue I had with this book. All of the characters felt like reruns of every other “found family” novel written in the last 30 years. The young, quirky but endlessly lovable genius, the stalwart good guy with a strong moral compass, the tortured lost soul, and the hooligan that gets them all into trouble. Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov had more intrigue in his pinky finger than all of them combined.

It was like reading a haphazard combination of tropes I’ve read before that I didn’t necessarily like on the first go-around. On a positive note, I did like the setting. I like the idea of setting a story in the 1950s in the U.S., but the time period was only really explored with Wooly Walcott’s family— the same Walcott family featured in his first novel, Rules of Civility. It’s a sign of this book’s poor execution that one of its best aspects is taken from Towles’ earlier work.

Towles is a talented writer, which is how I managed to make it through 576 pages of something I’d usually give up on during chapter one. He kept suspense up throughout and I did want to know what happened to the gang of boys we were following. I just expected more.

All I really got out of this book was the lesson not to assume one excellent novel equals a reliably excellent author. I might just read A Gentleman in Moscow again to cleanse my palate.