I read it several months ago and felt as you all do. So I was bummed out that it was this month’s choice, but I dutifully plodded through it again. I liked it much better the second time. I feel as if he’s written a fairy tale of some sort, or rewritten the Odyssey, and we’re supposed to be clever enough to make all the links and find the analogies – eg, Ulysses in The Lincoln Highway searching for his wife and child, like the original Ulysses; Billy somehow being the narrator – or is it the conductor? – of the story; Dutchess being the Evil One; Wooly the sweet naif.
I hated Dutchess too, for screwing with Emmett, but when you learn how his father really screwed him, I forgive him somewhat. His father left him in the orphanage, first, and then planted on him the watch he himself had stolen.
Lots of characters, and a real travelogue, but I’m not sure toward what end.
Keeping it brief — I was okay with the book. It didn’t wow me as A Gentleman in Moscow had done. I enjoyed Towles’ writing — he has a way with words that engages your attention but the story was not to my taste.
Same as everyone else, I disliked Dutchess intensely. I didn’t like the manner of his death mainly because it put Emmett in a bad light.
Emmett was likable. Billy was too unworldly. Woolly was written to be an object of compassion — it worked — felt no anger toward his character even though he was complicit in all of Dutchess’ plotting.
To be honest, I liked the book more just after I finished it. 6 weeks later I’ve forgotten most of it (including names so apologies for getting those wrong if I do) so it didn’t hold its charm for very long.
When I finished the book, my feelings were kind of neutral. I couldn’t say I liked it or that I didn’t like it. Instead of considering the book as a whole when I finished it, I was on a continuous loop of mulling over the ending. I realized I must have liked the book when I ordered the other two books Towles wrote.
I couldn’t like Duchess, but I had sympathy for him for the same reasons Emmett did. I didn’t mind Billy’s precociousness because I mostly saw a kid desperate to find a parent and have a family. Honestly, I’d love a sequel to find out if Emmett and Billy find their mother on July 4th, and to know if Emmett made a clean get-away or if the police will tie him to the lodge with two dead bodies and an empty safe.
Just a quick note that I didn’t find the analogies to The Odyssey subtle at all - kind of blatant, actually. Although Odysseus was much MUCH more cunning than Emmett. I gather Duchess plays the role of Poseidon, delaying the journey.
Did Emmett kill Duchess on purpose? When I read it I thought Emmett was making Duchess choose life over money and choosing money would lead to his death. My husband had a different take. He didn’t think Emmett tried to kill Duchess at all. He thought Emmett put Duchess in the boat just to give them the time they needed to get away. Emmett didn’t count on the wind picking up and blowing the boat further into the lake. If my memory is working, didn’t Emmett show Billy the boat with Duchess in it before they left? Emmett wouldn’t have shown Billy if he believed it was going to lead to Duchess’s death.
When the novel began, I thought Emmett was going to be the strong, silent type hero (akin to the Gary Cooper image that Dutchess said he resembled). But in the end, I found him hapless, weak, and a pretty darn inattentive older brother – always running off on a fool’s errand, leaving Billy in the care of others.
Here’s just one example of his inability to assert himself: When Duchess pushes the glass of champagne on him, Emmett drinks it – “having little choice.” He had plenty of choice.
And his stuttering attempt to tell Sally that he wasn’t interested in her was annoying. I don’t know why she’d want him anyway.
Ulysses from was a flawed character, too, but he was also a force to be reckoned with. Emmett, not so much.
I don’t believe he intended to kill Duchess – setting up a slow death by drowning would not have been Emmett’s style at all. He probably figured Duchess would be safe if he used the cash to plug the hole in the boat. But Emmett didn’t think things through (surprise, surprise). The margin for error was too great and Duchess’ unpleasant end made Emmett a murderer and Billy an accessory to murder – because it was he who told Emmett that Duchess couldn’t swim, thus setting up the “your money or your life” scenario.
Yes! It was Emmy in This Tender Land.
Yeah, so not a road trip – or at least not the straight line of the Lincoln Highway on the map that Towles dutifully included – an author’s trick of sorts (why?), as that route was never traveled. Rather, the characters seemed to travel in circles, continually losing and finding one another, mostly in New York.
I don’t believe Emmett deliberately killed Duchess. When he thought of placing Duchess in the Cadillac’s trunk but chose not to because “he would either get out of it quickly or not at all, bad outcomes both.” I think he just knew he had to get himself and Billy away from Duchess because Duchess was dangerous. He was buying time.
Do you think when Emmett put Duchess in the boat, it was him finally asserting himself after all times he didn’t? I think Emmett felt sympathetic towards Duchess because of his hard life, and because he saw the goodness in him (e.g., giving the orphans jam, taking Billy to see the professor, making dinner). But, after Duchess pointed the gun at him and Billy, he knew he was unpredictability dangerous.
I’d like to think that Emmett placed the money in the boat as a sign of fairness in splitting Wooley’s bequest. But he also knew that Duchess couldn’t swim and that money was his weakness/Achilles Heel, so putting him in the boat not only buys him time to get away but also puts Duchess in a dilemma. Without the wind (which I don’t think Emmett considered), he may have been patient enough to drift to shore; it was his own greed that caused his demise. Did Emmett kill him? No. But …
No, I think that was entirely an accident. If the wind hadn’t picked up and made Duchess try to save the money he would have been able to make it back to shore. I think Emmett was far too kind hearted to have killed him on purpose.
Maybe. But Emmett’s way of dealing with Duchess was overly clever, with awful results. Couldn’t he have just removed the carburetor from the Cadillac and stranded Duchess? That would have given him and Billy the headstart they needed.
In the end, Emmett strayed far from what Sister Agnes asked him to do for Duchess: Be “a friend who can steer him clear of folly and help him find the way to fulfilling his Christian purpose” (p. 132). Sister Agnes seemed wise and all-knowing, but not on this point: Duchess was a lost cause. Even so, I didn’t like the way it ended for him. I think Towles had to kill off Duchess because he had no other way of resolving the story to Emmett and Billy’s long-term benefit.
I read the Wikipedia summary not having read The Odyssey since I was a senior in high school. What stood out to me in the way of similarities, is that the book does indeed start off more or less in the middle, there is both the omniscient narrator and the parts where Odysseus tells his own story. Basically Odysseus keeps meeting people who befriend him along the way and help him, but his men keep causing problems by doing things they’ve been told not to do. There is the theme of being a guest, giving gifts, trusting strangers and also the idea that Odysseus is being tested by all these trials along the way. I’m not convinced there are any parallels to any specific people he meets along the way like Circe (who turns his men into pigs), or Calypso (who enchants him for 7 years) or the Cyclops who he escapes by hiding under sheep.
Very true – and in that respect, Duchess is Odysseus. As much as I disliked him, I have to say that Duchess has the strongest voice. The chapters for the other male characters (Emmett, Woolly, Pastor John, Abernathe, Ulysses) are all 3rd person omniscient. Only Duchess’ chapters are in the 1st person. He’s the star of the show, like it or not.
The only exception to the above is Sally. Her (few) chapters are 1st person narration. As I said earlier, I like Sally. I wish Towles had done more with her. But since he didn’t, I have to ask: From a literary standpoint, what purpose does she serve? If she were eliminated from the novel, would it affect the core of the story in any way? Nope, I don’t think so.
My cynical view (entirely in my imagination) is that Towles had written a fairly thick 400 + page novel with only male characters, and his editor said that wouldn’t fly. So he invented Sally and inserted her here and there to create a strong female voice (using 1st person narration to help with that). However, since the story had already been mapped out without her, her presence has virtually no impact on plot or outcome – only an impact on page count. Just my theory, but I’m stickin’ to it.
Let me be clear: I enjoyed reading The Lincoln Highway; I really did! But obviously, it got under my skin.
There is also Wooly’s sister Sarah, more a secondary character perhaps but she gives a ton of assistance along the way. She seemed to be the only remotely “normal” character. even considering her husband “Dennis”.