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rmkujawa 's review for:
The Lincoln Highway
by Amor Towles
Towles is a master of character - every person in this book feels real, despite that every single one is a mish-mash of tropes and archetypes that you’d never actually meet on the street. The plots of all his books are almost irrelevant - you follow along because you fall in love with the characters and don’t want to leave them, not because the story they are involved in is really that compelling. This one was no exception - I couldn’t put it down, but I also couldn’t tell you precisely why. There are moments throughout the book that I will always remember, because they pierce the soul in some indescribable way, and yet I don’t know I’d ever be able to tell you the “point” of the book.
I only gave it four stars, though, because Towles’ bizarre contrivance of using dashes instead of quotation marks began to drive me insane by about halfway through the novel. There is no in-novel reason for it, and the dialogue is not written in dialect, so it just comes across as gimmicky and pretentious. With two bestsellers-destined-to-be-classics behind him, I expected better.
I only gave it four stars, though, because Towles’ bizarre contrivance of using dashes instead of quotation marks began to drive me insane by about halfway through the novel. There is no in-novel reason for it, and the dialogue is not written in dialect, so it just comes across as gimmicky and pretentious. With two bestsellers-destined-to-be-classics behind him, I expected better.