But it makes you wonder what Franzen might accomplish if more were at stake His new novel, ‘Crossroads,’ is extraordinary, immersive, even fun. Billy’s own corn-fed idealism leavens the sometimes-bleak travails along our heroes’ journey.īooks Review: Is Jonathan Franzen too big to fail? The book-within-the-novel is both a convenient source of nested tales and a thematic vector, indicating Towles’ commitment to wrestling with classic Americana - that braid of fact, fiction and derring-do so many of us recognize as a birthright, for better or worse.

He functions as the deus ex machina of the book not only does he set events in motion, he also has an almost magical ability to pull just the right story out for the strangers he meets along the way - mainly from “Professor Abacus Abernathe’s Compendium of Heroes, Adventurers, and Other Intrepid Travelers” - a gift from the Morgen town librarian. He has sensible plans to take Billy to Texas, where he can start buying modest houses and flipping them until he’s amassed enough real estate to set them up on firm financial ground.īilly has other plans. In the garage, Emmett finds what’s most important to him, after Billy: His 1948 Studebaker Land Cruiser. That’s a wide load of metaphor for any book to bear, even one nearly 600 pages long. Here the author has chosen that most American of icons for his title and plot: a famous highway, dedicated in 1913, that not only spans the vast country from east to west but is named for the president who united its north and south. Not much links this novel with Towles’ other work - “ Rules of Civility” and “ A Gentleman in Moscow,” two books that also have little in common except their historicity and their popularity. But they capture the essence of this old-fashioned, meandering tale of two orphaned brothers in the 1950s and their journey in search of a future. “Lovin’ to go to one place and havin’ to go to another.”ĭuchess, the felonious foil to law-abiding Emmett, does not open Amor Towles’ new novel, “ The Lincoln Highway,” with those words. “Well, that’s life in a nutshell, ain’t it,” says Duchess, recently escaped from a boys’ detention center in Salina, Kan., and recently arrived at his friend Emmett’s Nebraska farm. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.

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