Although this entire novel surreptitiously revolves around their road trip from Morgen, then from New York to California...somehow I felt that this had nothing to do with the journey per se. This entire book completely threads around the four protagonists, and certain other additional but essential characters, in trying to decipher them and reason them out against the backdrop of the times and the setting of the novel. It addresses a lot of issues and pains and dilemmas that one goes through in their late teens and especially, if they belong to a certain kind of households. I must say, Towles is a genius, because he didn't keep a single stone unturned - from the rich and homely hearth of Woolly's household, to the wandering gypsy and trickster of a father that Duchess had...he travelled from the highest to the lowest, to the luckiest to the worst of drudgery, to the most conscientious and the coolest, from the best to the worst of crimes, in sickness and in health, from marriage to rejection, to missing mothers to dying fathers. In other words, the novel is a potpourri of feelings, emotions, experiences and adventures. One of the best I've ever read❤️.