Read 18/05/2022-28/05/2022

You are viewing: Who Is Sally In The Lincoln Highway

Rating 4 stars

The Lincoln Highway follows 18 year old Emmett Watson from the middle of the United States to its East Coast along the Lincoln Highway. It is June 1954, and Emmett has just been released early from an eighteen month sentence at a juvenile work farm in Kansas, due to his father dying. With an 8 year old brother, Billy, to look after, Emmett wants to leave his childhood home in Nebraska behind to start a new life somewhere else. Duchess and Woolly, two friends who have escaped from the work farm, stowing away in the boot of the car that carries Emmett home, have other ideas about that.

The Lincoln Highway is Amor Towles’s third book, and the third book I’ve read by him. I loved both of his previous books, Rules of Civility and A Gentleman in Moscow, and had high hopes for this one, too. It opens with a quote from Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, so gets off to a good start in my book.

The novel is split into ten parts, counting down from ten to one, each part covering a day on the journey from Nebraska to NYC. Each chapter is from the perspective of one of the characters. Some characters narrate their own segment of the story, but not Emmett. Emmett is always observed.

Emmett is taken home from the work farm by its progressive warden, a man we are told has a master’s degree and is an admirer of Franklin D Roosevelt. His pep talk to Emmett on arrival at his Nebraska home exhorts Emmett to learn from his mistake and to not follow a path into further crime, as so many who end up at the work farm do. Through this speech, we learn that Emmett was involved in a boy’s death, that his eighteen month sentence was by way of payment of a debt to the boy’s family, that he is not from the sort of background that makes a life of crime inevitable. When the warden shuts up, we also learn that Emmett doesn’t believe that his debt is paid, but rather it is something he will continue paying by living the best life he can.

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More exposition is waiting inside the house, in the form of the banker come to foreclose on the loan Emmett’s recently deceased father had taken out. The opening quote from Willa Cather makes sense, as her novels are about the optimism of those who headed West to the prairies to establish farms, but also about the hardship encountered as part and parcel of farming life. Emmett is not going to inherit that life from his father. He is going to have to find a new way to live a good life.

While Emmett was away, Billy was looked after by a neighbouring rancher, Mr Ransom, and his daughter Sally. Sally has found new purpose in looking after Billy and is reluctant to relinquish her role as care giver, although it’s not just Billy that she wants to care for. Mr Ransom is of the opinion that the family of the boy Emmett killed will make Emmett and Billy’s lives hell, and lets Emmett know this, suggesting that the boys leave town quickly. But Emmett is ahead of him and has already decided to leave for his new life somewhere else the next day.

Within these opening pages, we learn that Emmett is pragmatic but no walkover. He signs the legal papers relating to the mortgage on the farm to have the business done with. When the banker tries to claim title to a car in the barn, though, Emmett stands his ground. The car is his. He spent two summers working with the local carpenter to pay for it. Nobody is going to take it from him. In that moment of determination, I liked Emmett. Later, we learn that his carpentry skills are at the heart of his plan to build a new life for him and his brother.

I also liked Billy. At 8 years old, he already has a good grasp on how the world works. He’s bookish and inquisitive, practical in his own 8-year-old way. It is Billy who decides that their new life should be in California. Emmett favours Texas, but Billy has an undeniable logic to his choice. When he was still an infant, their mother walked away from her life with them on the farm. The boys believed that she had never been in touch since, but after their father’s death, Billy found a stack of postcards she had sent to them, hidden by their father. The postcards were from towns along the Lincoln Highway, heading in the direction of California, sent each day for nine days following their mother’s departure. The last card was sent from San Francisco. In Billy’s mind, he and Emmett need to go to California and find their mother in San Francisco. Unfortunately, Billy is also too credulous for his own good, something that causes a problem a little down the line.

Before Emmett can make a decision which way to go from Nebraska, his friends from the work farm put in an appearance. Duchess, the son of a wayward actor and conman from New York, has a way with words and quickly reveals the plan he and Woolly have made to travel to Woolly’s family holiday home and claim Woolly’s inheritance by stealing $150,000. Woolly, it turns out, is the scion of a wealthy family and has been declared “temperamentally unfit”, with his inheritance placed in a trust fund managed by his brother-in-law. There are shades of Britney Spears to this plot line. Woolly emerges as unworldly, sheltered from the realities of life by his wealthy upbringing, and distracted by his addiction to a ‘medicine’ that numbs him. His nickname is apt.

Towles writes his characters well. He inhabits their skin and brings to life who they are on the page. Even incidental characters are vividly drawn. The story moves along at a good pace and is well plotted. We learn what we need to know when we need to know it. There is humour, jeopardy, a moral core. I cared about the characters and what happened to them.

Duchess is a complex character. Raised from the age of eight in an orphanage run by nuns, he’s described by the Sister in charge as someone with “goodness in him, a goodness that has been there from the beginning, but which has never had the chance to fully flourish.” My reading of Duchess is that his goodness is misguided; he might do things with good intentions, or at least without intentional malice, but he still hurts others in their doing. A number of the decisions he makes, on some sort of pseudo Robin Hood basis, made my gut twist with the injustice of his behaviour. Particularly around other people’s property.

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Sally is a slow burn as a character. She begins the novel as a cliché, seen through the eyes of the male characters around her – housekeeper, care giver, potential helpmeet. Towles gives Sally a first person voice in her chapters. She’s frustrated, but not in the way the men around her think she is. She’s frustrated by the patriarchy and the way it relies on, but doesn’t acknowledge, the hard work that women do to keep the world of men running smoothly. It’s inevitable that Sally takes to the road herself, when Emmett fails to keep a promise to her. It’s a triumph when she confounds male expectations of who she is and what she wants.

Towles also captures the essence of the 1950s as a decade still with one foot in the past, but straining towards modernity. Some of the action would have been at home in a novel set in the 1930s, but the presence of men back from the Second World War, or absent from their families because of it, makes clear that this is an America adjusting to the second half of the 20th century. Social structures are under strain as Emmett’s generation start to question the way of life of their parents and grandparents. Towles doesn’t stage rebellion on the heightened dramatic scale of Rebel Without a Cause or The Wild One, but dissatisfaction with the established order of things is present just beneath the surface.

As the story progressed and Billy’s very particular nature was revealed in more detail, I was reminded at times of the film Rain Man. Some of Billy’s traits suggested neurodiversity to me – his attention to detail, his powers of recall, his literalness – but the innocence of his 8 years on the planet was also an important factor in who he is as a character. I perhaps linked to Rain Man, too, because of the classic car at the heart of the journey. Charlie and Raymond Babbit travel in a 1949 Buick Roadmaster convertible. Emmett’s car is a 1948 Studebaker Land Cruiser hard top.

When his car and the money hidden in it is taken by Duchess, Emmett resorts to crossing America by hitching a ride in a boxcar. Although he has called on Sally to look after Billy for him while he makes his way to New York to reclaim his car, she refuses, arguing that Billy needs to be with his brother. And so Emmett and Billy make the journey together. It’s a journey full of tension, with the brothers encountering two other boxcar riders, only one of them friendly. There’s also humour. At one point, in search of food, Emmett enters a private dining car and encounters two drunk men, guardians of another man travelling to Chicago for his wedding. The dining car is owned by the groom-to-be’s great-grandfather, a business man who might be described as The Sausage King of Chicago, although Towles doesn’t bestow that sobriquet upon him. The association that I wrought made me smile, anyway.

Billy makes a friend in the boxcar rider called Ulysses. His life story bears similarities to that of the Greek legend, and he proves a useful protector for Billy and Emmett on their arrival in New York.

Once in New York, the story ebbs and flows between Woolly’s reunion with his sister, Duchess’s quest to right some wrongs, Billy’s experience in the vagrant camp that Ulysses leads the brothers to, Emmett’s attempts to track down Duchess and his car, and Sally’s arrival to track Emmett and Billy down. Towles paints a vivid picture of the city and its different classes of inhabitants that will be broadly familiar to anyone who has watched Mad Men.

There are delays and diversions that keep Emmett and Billy from starting their journey back west and on to California, including a slightly random interlude involving Billy, Ulysses and Professor Abacus Abernathe, the author of the book Billy carries with him everywhere, that felt a little out of place for me. It is a meandering yarn, but it’s also a story about the road, about journeys more than destinations, and it’s the twists and turns that give meaning to the tale.

The format of the novel would lend itself to a tv serialisation. Reading it felt a lot like watching a tv drama, with the way the character storylines intersect and the overall plot builds. It was a cracking good read, perfect for the summer.

Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHO