Counting backwards has a strange pull.

"Three, two, one..." that creates tension, growing expectation and ultimately: inevitability.

As if, when the count is over, something really has to happen.

As if something had to start after that.

"Three, two, one," but then nothing happens.

You can feel the hole of disappointment you're falling into just by imagining it.

Amor Towles has counted the main chapters of his new novel "Lincoln Highway" backwards: it starts with "ten" and ends with "one", it is about ten days in June 1954 in the lives of three eighteen-year-old boys and one eight-year-old boy.

But what happens between ten and one constantly undermines the expectations that build when counting down like this and the novel then also of a car,

Tobias Ruether

Editor in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.

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Because it's not as if there aren't already about 357 American road trip novels with something like this plot.

So you already have a pretty good idea of ​​what elements are coming your way: when, in a story, a couple of boys who hardly have a driver’s license get into a car and drive off because life begins at the end of the road – or the realization is waiting that life had long begun when they got into that car.

In “Lincoln Highway” Towles does not fundamentally deviate from this model of the road trip novel.

But he does some things so differently that you read the ten, nine, eight, seven, six ... chapters of his hero's journey with growing expectation, even if at some point you no longer believe that anything will turn out as it should .

And that a triumphant finale follows when the chapters are counted down.

The first highway that goes from coast to coast

Lincoln Highway tells the story of brothers Emmett and Billy Watson, who lost their father who had to abandon his farm in Nebraska.

Old Watson was a headstrong man who didn't till his land the way his neighbors thought God had given him to farm, and he was so unsuccessful that the farm ended up being owned by the bank.

His wife ran away one day without a word.

Then, in the summer of 1954, the father dies - and his older son, Emmett, returns home from reform school to settle the bankruptcy.

And then to start all over again with his brother Billy in Texas.

But Billy has other plans: He and his brother want to look for the mother, who drove west along the Lincoln Highway to escape from the family.

A couple of postcards from July 1946 that Billy found in his father's things prove that. Maybe the mother lives in San Francisco, where the Lincoln Highway ends?

It's the first coast-to-coast highway, named in 1912 for the President who fought a civil war to abolish slavery.

Emmett doesn't really know.

But Billy would like to drive off right away.

But before the two come to terms, two more boys show up: Duchess and Woolly, who Emmett met in reformatory.

They steal the Studebaker at the first opportunity.

And leave Billy and Emmett before their road trip really gets underway.

A productive restlessness

The truth is that in this road trip novel, there is no road trip at all.

The Studebaker stands more than it drives.

Billy and Emmett travel to New York in a freight train car;

that's where Woolly and Duchess went in Emmett's Studebaker to steal Woolly's inheritance from grandfather's safe.

But the novel does not show the road trip of these two either.

He does not show the highway, not the wind, no motels and gas stations, but: diversions.

junctions.

And lots of glitches.

You might think that was a scam - if Towles hadn't accompanied the detours and false starts of his story with a permanent change of perspective.

The perspective keeps shifting.

In one chapter you look at the events through the eyes of one character, in the next another.

There are also two narrative selves, one of which even belongs to a woman, because there are women in this novel, albeit rarely.

In any case, all of this creates such a productive restlessness that one stays awake.

"Lincoln Highway" seems as if the novel had basically already been filmed, you can see the cinematic images so strongly in your mind.

But that belies how carefully it is written, both stylistically and narratively.