On Halloween of 2021, which happened to fall on a Sunday, the Washington Post published its weekly list of hardback bestsellers, and to my amusement, the first three fiction titles were The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles, Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, and State of Terror by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny. Why was I amused? Because those are the three books that I just finished reading consecutively, and because my reading list rarely consists of current bestsellers.
Since I’m so uncharacteristically au courant, I feel not merely nudged but called to comment on these three quite different and successful novels. All three are long. (Okay, the Clinton-Penny novel is maybe a bit too long, but not fatally so.) All three are ambitious. All three are page-turners. All three have benefited from strong reviews and the reputations of their authors. All three present appealing characters and substantial themes. All three could generate a classic elevator pitch:
Towles, Two brothers set out on the most entertainingly episodic journey since Huck and Jim found that raft.
Doerr: An ancient manuscript inspires a series of interlocking heroic actions over several centuries.
Clinton and Penny: A feisty American Secretary of State confronts a series of threats at once personal, national, and global.
But all three supersede the confines of the elevator pitch triumphantly.
Before I go any farther, let me clarify that the Towles and Doerr books are literary novels that could reasonably earn nominations for Pulitzers, National Book Awards, and Booker Prizes. The Clinton and Penny collaboration is, to borrow from Maureen Corrigan, who in turn borrowed from Graham Greene, an entertainment. Towles and Doerr craft elegant sentences and conjure vivid scenes; Clinton and Penny rely frequently on the sentence fragment and the one-sentence paragraph to sketch enough of a setting to get us grounded in time and space. There’s an art to what all four writers are doing, but I can’t call State of Terror a work of art. Still, it’s a commendably distracting yarn. Clinton’s expertise with affairs of state and her personal experience with government at the highest levels marries smoothly with Penny’s skill in setting multiple plots in motion and keeping them all clear for a reader. The result is a book that feels at once like a good season of “24” on television and an inside look at how intelligent government officials would respond to one crisis after another. Moreover, as an English teacher, I had to admire the variety and wit of the rhetorical devices used as a private code between Ellen Adams, the protagonist, and Betsy Jameson, her best friends and confidante. One of them types a text message—An oxymoron walks into a bar—and the other confirms her identity with an appropriate reply: and the silence was deafening. At nearly 500 pages State of Terror will probably not conjure memories of Samuel Johnson on the topic of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, but Johnson’s famous assessment of Milton’s epic—“none ever wished it longer”—fits. Still, you get your money’s worth.
Anthony Doerr and Amor Towles both faced the challenges of high expectations after each delivered hugely popular and acclaimed novels with All the Light You Cannot See and A Gentleman in Moscow. Both writers have met the challenge magnificently. Doerr, in Cloud Cuckoo Land, risks charges of being a show-off when he so deftly manages multiple genres, many points of view, and a distinctive set of narrative voices in this stunning tour de force. We get historical fiction, modern-day social commentary, and sci-fi in a work that recalls David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas but stands very much on its own. Despite my willingness to do the elevator pitches earlier in this posting, I detest the very idea of reducing a huge, ambitious novel to one theme or sound bite. (It’s so glib and easy to summarize Hamlet as a play about a man who can’t make up his mind. If that were all that Hamlet offered, then Shakespeare could have rendered it as a quatrain in one of his sonnets.) But one of Doerr’s most striking themes is that of the resilience of literature and story. As many critics have noted, much of the novel takes place in a library, a repository of books, and Doerr’s novel itself serves as a repository of multiple stories. Bravo, Mr. Doerr, you dazzler.
I’m equally enthusiastic about Towles’s The Lincoln Highway. His protagonist, Emmett Watson, is your basically good guy, a 17-year-old recently released from a work camp to which he’d been sentenced for a crime. Emmett’s sidekick, his eight-year-old brother Billy, is almost unbelievably cute, endearing, and intelligent. (Lots of reviewers have called him precocious. That’s accurate enough, but he’s extraordinarily self-possessed, affectionate, and principled.) You have to love both of these kids. But the character who threatens to run away with the novel is Emmett’s friend Duchess, the son of a ne’er-do-well actor and an escapee from the work camp where Emmett was incarcerated. Duchess is dangerous but is also acutely aware of living in a moral universe. He’s a teenage version of Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit before the Misfit has chosen a life of nihilism. Much of this novel considers the settling of debts and obligations, and Duchess is a primary catalyst in such transactions. If Emmett is Oliver Twist—parentless, good-hearted, and kind—then Duchess is the Artful Dodger, who is not at all a good boy but who is a hell of a lot of fun on the page.
When I say that Billy is almost unbelievable, I’m getting at one of the most striking characteristics of this novel. At times Towles tiptoes right up to the border of the surreal or the fabulous, but he never quite crosses the line. Even in 1954, when the novel is set and when automobile traffic would be greatly reduced from the way it is today, surely driving from Nebraska to New York City would be more difficult than it seems in Towles’s telling. Indeed, driving from the outer suburbs into the heart of the city comes off as no more difficult than riding a bike from Opie’s house to Sheriff Taylor’s office in Mayberry. I might quibble, too, that tracking down an alcoholic should be a bit harder than it is for these kids. But I’m not complaining. Towles is inviting us to join these characters in their own odyssey, or perhaps I should say Odyssey, in a novel where tales of derring-do and heroism and fantastic events, including a pared-down version of the travels of Odysseus himself, speak to and affect the lives of a large cast of well-drawn characters. Perhaps the most impressive feat of all for Mr. Towles is that this novel is the antithesis of his last work. A Gentleman in Moscow unfolds within the claustrophobic world of a luxury hotel in Russia. The Lincoln Highway races into motion by car, train, and foot, and it roars to the ideal conclusion, one simultaneously surprising and inevitable.
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