The Lincoln Highway tells the story of a very eventful 9-day period when Emmett (17) is released early from a youth work camp in Salina, Kansas and returns to Nebraska in the company of the warden, but unbeknownst to them, his buddies from the work camp (Duchess and Wooly) are hiding stowaway in the trunk. Emmett and Billy (8-yr old younger brother) plan to leave Nebraska and relocate in California, now that their dad's dead. Billy wants to try and find their mom in San Francisco, where the postcards she sent make it seem like she went (postcards sent from along the Lincoln Highway), and Emmett wants to use his carpentering skills to help buy/fix up old houses and sell them at a profit in CA where the population is exploding and housing is in high demand.
The story and choices/actions/plot the characters follow are paralleled in some ways by the stories/characters in the book of heroic tales that Billy carries with him (Ulysses, Odysseus...etc). The idea of being on a journey/quest, and the special, innate traits/qualities people have that affect how they choose to act in the world. This is not an overtly plot-driven book in the popular, modern sense of the word. Instead, people's inner traits determine their actions, and those ricochet off the other characters' actions, which lead to the chain of events of the story. Perhaps Duchess is the biggest instigator of plot, since he's motivated by his own internal brand of justice, which flies in the face of the actual law.
The story is set in the early 1950s, and I definitely got a sense, as I do when I see 1950s movies, of a world that is "rosy-colored glasses" - all sepia-toned, where people are inherently good, they have a basic integrity to them (their words are their bonds), and there is no ugliness or sordid villainy. Also, whatever bad guys are out there get what's coming to them.
I was actually OK with whatever nostalgia the novel seemed to create for that 1950s world, where there was also hope, unlike now, which strikes me as so incredibly otherwise.
My own complaint, and it isn't really that if I get seduced into the above-described nostalgia, is that the characters tend to border on simplistic - too internally uniform -- and not the conflicted/torn/messy people so often depicted in more modern stories.
I love Towles' quiet writing style, which fits his historical novels -- and I especially liked A Gentleman in Moscow, which I preferred to this book.