Amor Towles on The Lincoln Highway: ‘More than a soundtrack to rebellion, Rock ‘n’ Roll was the cause’ 

The author says he chose to set his new novel in the 1950s as it was a strange kind of an oasis, sowing the seeds of the many revolutions that sprouted in the turbulent ‘60s and ‘70s 

Amor Towles (58) says he has been writing fiction since he was in high school. “One of the most interesting aspects of the writing process is to nail down an idiosyncratic perspective,” he says over a video call. “ Rules of Civility (2011) is from the perspective of a 25-year-old woman from a working class background in 1938, while  A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) draws from the central character’s tone. He is an aristocrat, born in the 19th century in Russia and living in the Soviet era.” 

Raised in the school of thought that a young writer should practise writing from different perspectives, Towles says, “Today a young writer might be told that they do not have the right to write from a particular perspective. That didn’t exist as a notion when I was young. I am glad because it allowed me to hone the art of inventing individuals and hearing what they sound like.” 

It is second nature now, says Towles . “When I am creating a story I am immediately listening for who these people are.” An outliner, Towles says he spends a few years designing a book. For his latest book,  The Lincoln Highway (Penguin Random House), the idea was about an 18-year-old, Emmett, returning home from a work farm with two other 18-year-olds, Duchess and Woolly, traveling along, hidden in the trunk of the warden’s car.  

“I always knew the story takes place over 10 days, it was set in the mid-50s, it starts in the Midwest and ends in New York—those were things I knew in the first 24 hours. My original intention for  The Lincoln Highway was to tell the story from two perspectives — Emmett’s and Duchess.” 

Emmett, the Manhattan-based author says, has a toned-down way of thinking and looking at the world. “Duchess’ father is a failed Shakespearean actor. He has great command of language and a Shakespearean view of the world. Those are two different archetypal upbringings in America — a New Yorker and a Midwestern scholar, and those are the two principal voices that would make the book.”  

As Towles wrote the other characters, he realised that the reader needed to hear from them directly. “Having got well into the book I went back again bringing Woolly and Sally into the narrative, and eventually ended up with eight voices.” 

Towles says he would not have done that if he had not been able to hear the eight voices strongly enough. “Mozart said, ‘if you have eight people talking at once and you can’t understand anything, it is cacophony. If eight people sing at once, even if there are different words, it can have a great, beautiful impact.’ In a narrative too, you try for complementary harmonies, so that the beauty, variety and tonality of the different singers come across as fine compositions and not chaos.”