But reading is often a trust exercise, extending time and grace to an author who has wowed in the past or who seems to be building toward a point worth hearing. How might a lay reader navigate these wordy waters? Without unpacking the narrative across semesters of academic study, what can I, the good-natured reading public, do when the labyrinthine allusions, asides, and tips of the hat are so thick as to become disorienting and off-putting? If it’s literature – and this is LITERATURE! – does the author’s prowess supersede my need as a reader to connect and feel with a novel? Whether Towles means to toy with the hero’s journey, Greek mythology, a communist manifesto, good versus evil, life as a stage, Shakespeare, Sinatra, Dumas, or Barnum and Bailey, does it matter that it’s a splendid literary triumph if the torrent of words unseat me whenever I start to engage?įrom another author, The Lincoln Highway and I might have parted ways long before the journey’s end. The layers of literary reference and homage here are bottomless, and while the author’s skill with words can be breathtaking, it also functions as crowd control. With The Lincoln Highway, Amor Towles is 3 for 3 in telling 20th century riches-to-rags stories about characters whose paths from privilege to labor imbue them with substance while retaining their fundamental elegance.
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