The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles | ***** | Let's just get to it: I loved this book. This is one of the best pieces of fiction I've read this year, made doubly sweet by the fact that my daughter recommended it to me — which I assume means I've succeeded as a parent.
The story Towles crafts here, which carries a cast of memorable characters across a sprawling chunk of both America's geography and chronology, is part "A Prayer for Owen Meaney" and part "Peace Like a River," and the whole thing is just gorgeous and hilarious and sad and joyous and probably several more adjectives I haven't thought of yet.
I'll be thinking about this novel a lot, and I suspect it will go on my list of "infinite re-reads," which is a short shelf indeed. I have a copy on the way to the library if you're interested.
“If you take a trait that by all appearances is a merit—a trait that is praised by pastors and poets, a trait that we have come to admire in our friends and hope to foster in our children—and you give it to some poor soul in abundance, it will almost certainly prove an obstacle to their happiness. Just as someone can be too smart for their own good, there are those who are too patient for their own good, or too hardworking.”
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