The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

"...one thing I have learned is that there is just enough variety in human experience for every single person in a city the size of New York to feel with assurance that their experience is unique. And this is a wonderful thing. Because to aspire, to fall in love, to stumble as we do and yet soldier on, at some level we must believe that what we are going through has never been experienced quite as we have experienced it."                  

        -Professor Abacus Abernathe, from the novel

I love this novel! I had checked it out from the library on Overdrive and it took me so long to start it, I was at risk of losing it before I could finish. And after I had been captivated by the plot and characters! At over 500 pages, I had a lot of reading to do in a few days but I made it! 

The story reminded me of Huckleberry Finn and, more recently, This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger. I had never heard of the Lincoln Highway which the reader learns was the first transcontinental road. 

In 1954 18-year-old Emmett Watson has just been released from a work farm where he was sentenced for manslaughter. He is returned to his home in Nebraska and his much younger brother Billy. The two are orphans and the family property is being foreclosed on, so they decide to take the Lincoln Highway west to start a new life. 

Two of Emmett's former inmates show up---Duchess, a charming but devious one, and Wooly, a sensitive, caring type---and they have some different plans for the 4 of them. I cannot begin to tell you all the adventures they have, and I wouldn't want to. Amor Towles has done an incredible job of it through multiple narrators.

Billy is attached to a book called Professor Abacus Abernathe's Compendium of Heroes, Adventurers and Other Intrepid Travelers. The book includes many references to the Odyssey, which in a way, is what Emmett and Billy are on---even including the introduction of a vagabond named Ulysses. Billy is able to meet the author, who is quoted above. 

I rate The Lincoln Highway a 5 out of 5. I could even see reading it again in a few years. Maybe the second time I could read more slowly and savor the intricacies of the plot and Towles's wonderful writing.