The story begins in Morgen. Nebraska, where eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is returning to his hometown after serving an abbreviated sentence at a Kansas work program that he was doing for inadvertently killing someone who was taunting him. Emmett’s father has died, the family farm has foreclosed, and Emmett’s eight-year-old brother Billy needs a guardian.
It is 1954, and Emmett’s Studebaker, purchased before he went away, is waiting in the garage. Emmett wants to get out of the small town and away from his reputation to start anew. Billy, who is quite precocious, is prepared to take off with Emmett in search of their mother, who left them years ago and is supposedly living in California. Billy has researched the Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental road for automobiles in the United States, and is eager to travel.
As they prepare for the road trip, Duchess and Woolly, two of Emmett’s bunkmates from Kansas, show up at Emmett’s home after escaping from the facility. They convince Emmett to drive them to a train station. Unfortunately, Duchess and Woolly have different agendas, and neither Emmett nor Billy fully understands their dispositions or conniving ways. After several unforgettable escapades, the story continues to New York City, obviously not in the direction of California and the story never moves westward.
Woolly is a character who probably has a learning disability or similar condition for which he self-medicates. He finds comfort in repetition, misses social cues, acts impetuously, and lacks executive function. The adults in Duchess’s life have betrayed him, and his unscrupulous behavior as he plays out a moral accounting system is entertaining. Emmett has vowed to stay out of trouble and take care of his brother, but this is not easy with the company he keeps. All the boys lack adult guidance and have limited ability to navigate their adventures on the road. Billy’s constant companion is a book about heroes that he has read more than twenty times. Although the older boys sometimes tire of his reading and retelling of stories about ancient and modern heroes, they all recognize for different reasons that Billy is quite astute at applying simple logic to situations and figuring out some of the obstacles they face. Billy equates their road trip to a heroic journey and uses literary descriptions and rudimentary map skills as his guide to successfully searching for hopes and dreams.
The action takes place over ten days. Towles conveys an appreciation for landmarks in the United States, especially those in New York, that elevates them to the status of ancient wonders. The beauty of the Empire State Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, Pennsylvania, and Grand Central stations amaze the youthful travelers. A camp for the homeless on deserted railroad tracks is depicted as a place for modern epics. Even the Howard Johnson rest stops, so ubiquitous in the 1950s, come across as idyllic in this book.
But the story is not only focused on places. It is rich in characters. The novel’s plot moves along as the boys experience one adventure after another, sometimes singly, but also in pairs and threesomes. As they travel, we learn the main characters’ backstories and hear the tales of the people they encounter, which provide an engaging multilayered story. Some minor characters are stereotypic, but all represent those that comprise the fabric of America’s population in the 1950s. Some are amoral, and others are heroes. All can be related to age-old heroes in Billy’s book. Towles is an adept writer who ties all major and minor characters in amusing and satisfying ways. Along the way, through many points of view, the reader is forced to consider timeless themes such as youthful indiscretions, irreversible actions, the power of childhood memories, and fate. In addition, of course, the American class system and racial relations are part of the characters’ discussions and realizations. Finally, all of the characters plan and execute fantastical schemes and tell a tale about luck, grit, false hopes, and living a fairy tale.
