Toward the ending of Amor Towles' latest, The Lincoln Highway a character pauses to look at a wall full of photographs, an elegaic moment he commemorates with these thoughts:
...the funny thing about a picuture is that while it knows everything that's happened up until the moment it's been taken, it knows absotively nothing about what will happen next. And yet, once the picture has been framed and hung on a wall, what you see when you look at it closely are all the things that were about to happen. All the un-things. The things that were unanticipated. And unintended. And irreversible.
As I started on my way through The Lincoln Highway, I kind of found myself wanting to hate it, but not quite being able to. A weird reading experience, to say the last, but of course it wasn't really the story or the characters I was wanting to hate (with a few unambiguous exceptions), but how history unfolded afterwards, for the better and for the worse -- and how rather more people than I would have originally thought are so upset that the worse happened (even if they themselves came through it just fine) that they'd rather the better hadn't happened either (even if they, too, have benefitted from it).
People read historical fiction for a couple of different reasons. A lot are for a kind of romance; the past becomes an impossible-to-reach kind of place where people dress and talk and eat and act differently and we're delighted to be tourists in that so-different world for a while. We might be encountering historical figures we've come to idolize and get directly to watch them doing the deeds that made them famous. Or we might see them through the eyes of an imaginary ordinary schmoe whose less famous deeds affect or are affected by those of the Great. Or we might enjoy the kind of plots we enjoy from other genres stitched onto historical events, witness the great popularity of things like murder mysteries set in Norman England (see especially Howard of Warwick, who does exactly this and makes them funny to boot), or high fantasy set in sort of France or Byzantium (hello, Guy Gavriel Kay), or that whole wild genre we call Weird Westerns. Or...
Or we might wish to visit the scenes of our own actual sort-of-remembered youths, in which romance threatens to yield to nostalgia.
We're living through another period in which nostalgia has been weaponized to turn people against one another in the name of making things like they were in the good old days, which only about half of us seem willing to remember that the good old days (in this case, the early 1950s in the United States of America) were only really good for the people on the top of the socio-political heap. Not so great if you were poor, a person of color, disabled, LGBTQ+, neuro-divergent, etc. But look, I get it -- for the people who had it good in the 1950s, there were probably more people who had it better than any other humans in history before or since. There were good union jobs that let a person support a family on just one income. Public education had higher standards and everybody pulled together to see that they at least came close to meeting them. Ladies still wore pretty dresses and men wore suits and stylish hats and cars were big and luxurious and made out of real steel and real leather and stuff was built to last. Yada yada.
But still, only some people got to enjoy that, and when everybody else started acting like they'd actually bought into that old American chestnut that anybody could have it if they only worked hard and behaved, well, the people on top, instead of trying to find a way to extend that good life to more people, they started squandering the resources that would have been required to achieve that on keeping everybody else down and out by whatever means necessary. And when everybody else wouldn't just meekly say, okay sir, sorry, I'll go back to my hovel and starve now -- things got nasty, and have been getting nastier ever since.
Point being, nostalgia for the 1950s is pretty toxic in this endless plague year of 2020 And Some Months, and if you don't think so, you're probably part of the problem, and I really wish you'd go get vaccinated before you catch this stupid virus and die or give it to someone else and they die. And maybe consider that if you just realize that "Black Lives Matter" doesn't mean that other lives don't, but that people want you to realize that black lives matter, too. In adition to, rather than instead of, as it were.
But I digress.
But so, then, why did I even pick up a historical novel set in the very time and place that all of this weaponized nostalgia points to as those good old days, then? Well, two things: the author and the title.
I really liked Towles' earlier work, A Gentleman in Moscow, I've many friends who've told me that Rules of Civility is every bit as good... and I hear Amor Towles' name mentioned in the same breath as my beloved E.L. Doctorow more and more, it seems. So I'm inclined to have a look at anything else with his name on it that crosses my path. Meanwhile, this new book of his is named for the Lincoln Highway, aka US Highway 30, which passes a mere 20 miles north of the town where I grew up and whose length (disguised most of the way as Interstate 80*) I have traveled from sea to shining sea my own self. Plus, if you're a fan of that great but incomplete old HBO drama, Carnivale, you've spent some time on that good old Lincoln Highway in your imagination already. Not as sexy as Route 66, but a lot more important in that boring, utilitarian, sound and unflashy way -- kind of like the president it was named for.
Plus, as the early course of the plot sets us up to believe, this road trip novel suggests it's going to take us west, right through all of the Wyoming towns in which I've spent most of my life in one way or another -- the trail of postcards left by the first abandoning character (lots of abandoning happens in this book), for instance, includes stops in Cheyenne, Rawlins and Rock Springs on the way to sunny California. So, I mean, of course I was going to read this.
But I had my suspicions. And for a long time, it felt like my suspicions were right. Because even though the young heroes of The Lincoln Highway are down and out at story's beginning -- Emmet Watson was just granted compassionate early release from a reform school after his dad died, leaving no one else to care for Emmet's eight-year-old brother, Billy, and the two young rogues who stowed away on Emmet's ride back to his family's failed Nebraska farm, Duchess and Wooly -- are all able bodied, good-looking, intelligent young white men (and boy) of the type that had to make pretty much a deliberate effort to fail in the USA of the 1950s, even if two of them are semi-orphaned and one is slightly neuro-divergent.
But, thank goodness, as the journey proceeds, we meet some characters with some melanin, but even there it's a tiny bit problematic in that they are Paragons of Respectability By White Standards**. Chief among these is Ulysses, a big burly black man who saves little Billy from an attack, who is not only a war veteran but a man who was happily married with a child on the way until he joined the army to go fight in World War II -- against his wife's wishes. She didn't understand, or didn't care, about the social pressures that came to bear on able-bodied men (even ones with deferred jobs like he had) to not just serve but Serve. When he came home, having survived the war, his family was gone, and he's been searching for them ever since. There is a very touching moment as Billy, during their ripening acquaintance, insists to Ulysses that he must have been named for the Greek hero and not the Civil War general/U.S. President, and that Billy thinks maybe Ulysses is Great Ulysses reborn and is thus destined to regain his family after ten years of wandering (of course this Ulysses has been wandering for just over nine years when we meet him). Ulysses cries and lets himself begin to hope again after Billy tells him the very abridged version of the Odyssey that is in his prized possession, a compendium of heroes real and imaginary, from Achilles to Zorro, with -- and while this book already seems like the most 1950s object ever, it proves to be even more so when the charming detail is shared that there is no entry for the letter Y apart from "You", with blank space for a boy*** to write down his own adventures when he has them someday.
But so, see, this just reeks of little white savior crap, right? And this is never really addressed or redeemed except that it kind of is just by the sheer quality of this goddamned book. The Lincoln Highway is a beautiful read, with wonderful scenes both funny and tragic and poignant and, it's got one more quality that I found way more refreshing than I should have (an indictment more of my general choices as far as what I read than of anything else, I reckon): its primary hero, Emmet, is actually heroic. Not in the sense of saving damsels in distress or foiling deadly plots or capturing bad guys, but in the sense of having a strong moral compass that he actually obeys throughout, a strict code that he actually adheres to, but without a trace of toxic masculinity. He has high standards for himself and his behavior and subjects his decision making to rigorous scrutiny, having learned well by observing the failings of his parents from an early age even before he made the mistake that sent him to reform school far away and then received an even more thorough-going moral instruction that he took to heart BUT GET THIS, he doesn't get judgmental of others who don't live up to his standards. Nor does he lose his temper unless truly extremely and very deliberately provoked. At times he has the impulse to yield to fury for less -- many times, frankly, because while Billy is just precocious and trusting and thus a handful, Duchess and Wooly are, in their different ways, still rogues(though as the story proceeds we kind of see that maybe Emmet has rubbed off on them a little bit), rogues whose very existence throws monkey wrenches into Emmet's and Billy's plans almost before they're laid and whose quirks and caprices keep on creating obstacles to the Watson brothers' progress through the story -- but he checks himself, explains his reasoning, and moves on to solving a problem rather than spending time casting blame or seeking to punish anyone.
I think the last hero like Emmet that I've encountered was maybe Captain John Carter of Mars (and yes, I know, he was a Confederate captain, but that's before he became John Carter of Mars). Kind of refreshing, is what I'm saying.
But see where this is still dangerous? I'm afraid that The Lincoln Highway could be a very dangerous book, with all the charm and musicality of prose of, say, Doctorow's Ragtime but without its notes of social criticism. It's a deeply pleasurable read if you can shut off that little nag of social conscience that I hope most of *my* readers have at any rate.
But maybe I'm the asshole for assuming that it's going to be weaponized? Are the alt-right types even reading contemporary U.S. fiction that isn't being flogged to them on extremist podcasts and OAN? All the places I see reviewing this book so far are outlets that are not beloved of that crowd -- NPR, the New York Times, etc. So maybe I'm worrying about nothing and should just shut up and enjoy the book and let other people enjoy it. BUT, I am extremely online, so I see stuff exactly like this getting corrupted all the time, so yeah, I guess what I've got to do is hope they don't find this. And that Amor Towles isn't one of those guys? Which... he kind of could be? Because I have a feeling all of his fiction is like this, maybe?
Maybe I should just delete this blog post, which got way more political than mine usually do. I guess you should all be glad I don't read a lot of historical fiction set in 20th century America.
Don't worry. I'll be bombarding you with Roberto Bolaño soon.
*Though hey, in Wyoming there are stretches where the Interstate diverges from the old highway because a bunch of landowners strong-armed the government into re-routing it so they, instead of other people, could collect the compensation even though the route they forced the interstate to take was already known to be much less safe, more prone to closures in bad weather, all around just worse, and that stretch of the Interstate is one of the deadliest in the country and I really wonder how many of their fellow human beings' blood is on that compensation money those landowners got... just a few years after the events in this novel, actually...
***And, even more cringe, the closest thing we get to a villain of color is a side character who has light skin and freckles (and this is mentioned more than once to make sure we notice) and can thus be understood as of mixed race and I'm still cringing a little bit at that choice.
***Think many girls were given a book like this back then? My knee-jerk thought is of course not, but come on, the 1950s were no more definable only by the stereotypes about them than our times should be to people in the future, if there are any! Ha ha!
