The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles (Viking, 2021)
I appreciate authors who can’t be pigeonholed. Just when you’ve gotten used to their work on a particular subject or in a particular genre, they shatter all expectations by doing something entirely different. Amor Towles is a good example—if you read The Rules of Civility and/or A Gentleman in Moscow, you probably didn’t expect his next novel to be all about a madcap odyssey across America by a ragtag bunch fresh out of juvenile detention in Kansas (including a couple who aren’t supposed to be out yet). But that’s just what he’s given us in The Lincoln Highway.
I use the word “odyssey” advisedly. Towles has rooted his story in Homer’s epic, going so far as to create a supporting character who’s a wandering ex-soldier named Ulysses. And he scatters references to Greek mythology throughout the book. In fact, there was something of a resemblance to the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, famously based on the same epic. It all made me wish I knew my Greek mythology better, because while I liked most of Towles’s book (more on that in a minute), I wasn’t always sure what it was trying to do.
The story is told from various points of view, using both first and third person. At the center of the story are 18-year-old Emmett Watson and his young brother, Billy, who plan to drive to California in search of a new life after their father’s death and Emmett’s early release from juvenile detention. But their plans are derailed by Duchess and Woolly, two of Emmett’s friends from the Kansas work farm, and before long the four are chasing each other from Nebraska to New York, running into a colorful cast of characters along the way.
Of the four main characters, my favorite was Duchess, the charming but flaky son of a washed-up actor. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Emmett, a young man of purpose and determination who kept getting stranded and robbed and led into ludicrous situations by Duchess. But I still couldn’t help liking Duchess, perhaps because he narrates his sections himself with the whimsical patter of a vaudevillian, always having a reason for even his most amoral acts. Woolly, Duchess’s fellow escapee, is a little off-kilter but endlessly goodhearted. Meanwhile, young Billy is such a preternaturally wise and angelic child that he’d make the Victorians say, “Dude, take it down a notch.”
Still, all four characters were worth spending time with. For the most part. As the story went on, I started to become aware of a growing mismatch between tone and subject matter that, by the end, became downright jarring. If not for the bright, adventurous feel of so much of the story, I might have been better prepared for what was going to happen. That’s right, I went and found myself another book with a bothersome ending. If this is becoming a trend in publishing, it needs to stop, because honestly, I don’t think any of us are in the mood right now.
But I can’t actually say I disliked The Lincoln Highway. In fact, I liked most of it quite a lot. And if you’re a fan of Towles’s previous work, I’d say you’ll probably like it too. It’s just that I was left with a little bit of a sour taste in my mouth and an uncertainty about what the story was actually trying to say … and a feeling that if I knew, I might not care for it.
Mr. Beethoven by Paul Griffiths (New York Review Books edition, 2021)
Mr. Beethoven is a book that I don’t know quite how to describe. This is getting to be something of a pattern, I realize. I swear I don’t do it on purpose, any more than I seek out unsettling endings on purpose. I look for books on subjects and in genres I like, and in doing so I just happen to stumble across some weird and wonderful things. It definitely keeps life interesting!
Anyway, boiled down, Mr. Beethoven is an experimental historical novel. Experimental in more ways than one. For one thing, it began life on the crowdfunding site Unbound before getting nominated for awards and picked up by a prestigious publisher, so its very origins were an experiment that turned out to be highly successful.
Then there’s the story’s premise. Griffiths sets it in a world—an obviously highly preferable world—where Beethoven lived past 1827 and traveled to Boston to write a new oratorio, based on the biblical story of Job. Griffiths surrounds the composer with the kinds of eager but frustrated patrons and colleagues that surrounded him in real life. And he adds a sensitive and talented widow who helps with the oratorio at a crucial moment, and a young female sign-language interpreter with the classic New England name of Thankful. The latter especially was such a convincing character and worked so well with Beethoven that I occasionally had to remind myself that she did not actually exist in real life.
The other kind of experimentation involves the writing itself, which plays with various techniques. Sometimes Griffiths goes all meta on us, writing about what it’s like for him to be telling this story and reflecting on the various choices he’s making as the storyteller. Sometimes he gives us elaborate footnotes in the style of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. In one case, to build suspense, he writes a sentence that’s five pages long. And when writing about Beethoven himself, he takes all dialogue directly from the composer’s own letters, simply placing the words into new situations.
For a while I couldn’t decide if all this experimentation added to the story or detracted from it. It’s a little difficult to get lost in a fictional world when the writer keeps reminding you that it is a fictional world. In the end, though, I did find myself absorbed—whether because of the tricks or in spite of them, who knows? I will say that Griffiths is a skillful enough writer to use them with assurance, and ultimately to get away with them. He’s a skillful writer about music, in particular; he gives us such a wealth of detail about Beethoven’s fictional oratorio on Job that, again, you’d swear it wasn’t fictional at all. There’s something special about a book that leaves you longing for a piece of music that never existed.
(Images copyright Viking and New York Review Books, respectively.)
Book Links
The Lincoln Highway on Amazon
The Lincoln Highway on Bookshop
Mr. Beethoven on Amazon
Mr. Beethoven on Bookshop
Other Links
I have a piece at Christ and Pop Culture that may seem familiar—it’s a slightly modified version of a piece that ran a few years ago as “The God of Little Things” at the Literary Life blog, before that blog changed hands and its old material was taken down. Thanks to my editors at CAPC for giving this piece a new home.
Also, I have a new piece in Fathom about C.S. Lewis and friendship.
Book Reviews: The Lincoln Highway; Mr. Beethoven
Incidentally, both of those links to the October 18 edition are meant to indicate The Mirror Visitor Quartet, not "Once upon a Wardrobe." I'm not very tech-savvy (okay, I'm not tech-savvy at all), but one of these days I hope to figure out how to link directly to a specific review.