Review by easnyder - The Lincoln Highway

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easnyder 's review for:

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles

4.0

challenging dark funny reflective sad slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

“…I am among the squanderers. One who has lived his life in the third person and the past tense.”

The Lincoln Highway sort of felt to me like Of Mice and Men meets Catcher in the Rye. This book really is almost a character study more than a story. The plot doesn’t seem to matter—it seems to exist only to give a framework for the characters to work within. Which means that the plot goes almost nowhere, despite how long the book is (over 500 pages). So, if you’re looking for a nice read with a fast moving plot that wraps up neatly with resolution for everyone, especially the characters you like…you’re probably not going to like this book.

Here’s the weird part. A lot of the usual features of this book are things I normally hate in most books: multiple character narration, timeline jumps. I normally do like a book that has neat resolution and likeable characters, and yet…I was sucked into this book. I found the less likeable characters to be far more interesting than the likeable ones (even though I was also really rooting for the likeable ones). I was fascinated to see the way these characters interacted with each other. Those character stories really drew me in.

And there were some really great lines too, good quotable ones: “You could almost hear the thumb of reality beginning to press down on that spot in the soul from which youthful enthusiasm springs.”

My real only hang up was the author seems to not have a good sense of time and distance for traveling across the country. There’s no way a single person driving alone would make it from the middle of Nebraska to NYC in a day and a half in 1954, especially with the vehicle over-heating twice. That’s just…no.

Otherwise, though, I found this a super compelling and entertaining read, despite what I was expecting.

Content Warnings