I have so enjoyed The Lincoln Highway. Towles is a fabulous story-teller with a superb insight into the human condition. Having really appreciated his A Gentleman in Moscow, I am amazed by this author’s skill in evoking the social and historical context of his narrative, without directly giving us a history lesson.
Set in 1954, this is the story of Emmett Watson, 18 years old and recently returned to the family farm in Nebraska. He has served a short sentence for involuntary manslaughter, but now his father has died, leaving him and his young brother Billy without a home. The bank has fore-closed on the farm and all Emmett has is his Studebaker car and a plan to move to California, to make a new life for himself and Billy. For his part Billy has two obsessions. He has a book of stories of great heroes and epic journeys, and his vision of those journeys shapes his part in the book, and in a sense the whole story. Billy’s other dream is to go to California to see the fire-works display on the 4th of July, as he believes somewhere there they will find their mother, who had left them many years earlier.
As it happens, the boys do not go to California along the Lincoln Highway, first up. Instead they find themselves teamed up with two other lads who have escaped from the same institution where Emmett had been placed. One, nick-named Duchess, is the provocateur of almost all the unfortunate happenings in this story. The other, Woolly, is the hapless son of an exceptionally rich family. Duchess and Woolly intend to avail themselves of a huge store of cash in one of the family’s homes, so by manipulation and deceit Emmett and Billy find themselves traveling the Lincoln Highway east rather than west, to New York.
Towles tells the story chapter by chapter, through the thoughts and actions of these and several other characters. It’s very effective. At the heart of the story is what I call a moral calculus. Emmett has done wrong and is told that he has ‘paid his debt to society’, though he avers that he will never accept that. He has taken another person’s life and his only response is to make good with his life now and for all the time available to him. Duchess, who had actually been falsely convicted, though very far from innocent, operates from a concern for his own progress and gratification. In essence, this is a ‘moral play’.
At a critical point in the story, Duchess recalls the instruction offered by Sister Agnes in St Nicholas’ Home for Boys, one of the many places where Duchess had been placed. Fowles describes Sister Agnes as ‘a strong-minded woman who finds herself in an evangelical profession with a captive audience’, but who does not avail herself of every opportunity to express her views. Rather, she chooses her moments and on one such occasion delivered the lesson she called Chains of Wrongdoing.
Boys, in your time you will do wrong unto others and others will do wrong unto you. And these opposing wrongs will become your chains. The wrongs you have done unto others will be bound to you in the form of guilt, and the wrongs that others have done unto you in the form of indignation. The teachings of Jesus Christ our Savior are there to free you from both. To free you from guilt through atonement and from your indignation through forgiveness. Only once you have freed yourself from both of these chains may you begin to live your life with love in your heart and serenity in your step.
Duchess does not understand these lessons at first but recalled that Sister Agnes had also said, What wisdom the Lord does not see fit to endow us with at birth, He provides through the gift of experience. Duchess claims to have seen later at least some of the sense of Sister Agnes’s sermon. (For all of this, page 91).
As Billy understands, this entire story is the outworking of so many of the themes of classical literature: the moral play of heroes, all flawed in some way, undertaking great journeys and epic challenges. The Lincoln Highway unfolds with the misfortunes, the folly and the goodness of each of the characters, not only these boys.
The question all along is whether this moral calculus holds. As Emmett seeks some reconciliation with the family of his victim, who respond brutally, while Duchess seeks some revenge on those who have mistreated him, and they all dream of making a fresh start somewhere, the question is whether in fact a person can be free of the chains of wrong-doing and find that love in their heart and serenity in their step.
Sister Agnes’s moral calculus implies that those who do not seek the freedom offered by the teachings of Christ will not find peace and love. Their chains will remain. The narrative supports that implication. But does the other side of the calculus hold as well? Towles invites us to draw our own conclusions.