The Lincoln Highway

A couple of weeks back I took a stack of mysteries in to Flyleaf to lighten my shelves, provide Jamie with a little profit margin, and nose around a bit. I ended up having little time to browse, but didn't really need to. Amor Towles' new novel The Lincoln Highway was right there on the shelf. I didn't really know Amor that well at Yale though we ran in somewhat overlapping circles, and the last time I ran into him he was a little arch. But the guy can write. His books are well-wrought but not overbearing.

This one is a flat out romp. I won't try to describe it too much. It starts out in Nebraska and at first I was thinking that Amor -- very much a bluebooded child of Wall Street -- was out of his depth. But I decided to get over it, let it go, and just enjoy it. Eventually it worked its way back to New York, where he's very much in his element.

It ends up at an old money country house on a lake in upstate New York, and I found myself having class envy. I've seen pictures of these kinds of places in magazines and in Ralph Lauren ads, I know they actually exist, there were actually plenty of analogs in Larchmont where Mary grew up. Hell, I even hung out at Mark's place in Warren, CT in college, which was pretty swank. And I live on a lake my damned self. But the house he was writing about was on a different scale.

This is of course typical consumerist lust to and class envy to which we are all, sadly, susceptible.

There were some disappointing aspects to the end of the book, but that's because I couldn't help but care about the characters, types though they may have been. And he does some deft flipping of expectations. But I won't be a spoiler. Read it.