If fiction at its best is, as one famous novelist once wrote, a continuous fictive dream, I nominate Amor Towles, most recently author of Lincoln Highway,as dream director extraordinaire.
It's not just that the story being told sounds like someone who is as guilty as sin trying to talk his/her way out of a traffic ticket; it's also that the events reel out one after another so inevitably, so plausibly, with a blush of childlike innocence, you want to laugh and forgive them their crazy schemes because they make us want to believe there's capacity for goodness at the core of their souls.
What I love about Lincoln Highway is this: It's literary adventure at its finest. At its heart, it's an action story with a heart; it's a stupendous one-of-a-kind adventure tale that involves the reader in pure story from the first page until the last.
The opening is notable because it's a homecoming, which usually occurs at the end of a story, so it immediately pulls you in—gives us, as readers, a new beginning, a new story to read, just as one of the characters who is being released from a juvenile detention facility, is being given a new beginning in life.
The experience of reading it? Well, it's like you jumping on a fast-moving freight train that then accelerates, pulling you along relentlessly 'til the end.
That's what I love about the book; at first it seems to take us from Nebraska to California, but then it turns and takes us magically from Nebraska to New York and reminds us of the richness of America in the 1950s when we were young and immortal and everything was possible, a time before cell phones, a time of freight trains and unbelievable wealth.
It suggested to me America's faded glory, how rich we were as a country, how rich we still are and how possible everything still is in relative terms—even in this summer of global climate change—how close we came and still could come; how great we could be again.
