The Lincoln Highway

This year on Christmas morning, for the first time in my life, I woke up with nothing to do. No kids jumping into my bed, no food that needed to be cooked and served, no table to set, no last minute-forgotten gifts to be foraged from the back of my closet and hastily wrapped.

It was a shock.

Until I settled in with Amor Towels’s The Lincoln Highway and indulged in a Christmas novel.

It was just the right story to carry me away into another world with like-able characters, literary hijinks and a sprawling plot.

If I couldn’t be with my family, I could at least spend the day with Emmet and Billy and Duchess and Woolly and Sally. And I whiled away the time in this joy ride of a book with it’s messages both lofty and down-to-earth.

The over-riding theme seemed to be Zeno’s paradox. That philosophical exercise about the illusion of arrival. Here’s how Towle’s protagonist, Emmet, remembered it from his school days.

At the start of Emmett’s junior year, the new math teacher, Mr. Nickerson, had presented Zeno’s paradox. In ancient Greece, he’d said, a philosopher named Zeno argued that to get from point A to point B, one had to go halfway there first. But to get from the halfway mark to point B, one would have to cross half of that distance, then halfway again, and so on. And when you piled up all the halves of halves that would have to be crossed to get from one point to another, the only conclusion to be drawn was that it couldn’t be done. Mr. Nickerson had said this was a perfect example of paradoxical reasoning. Emmett had thought it a perfect example of why going to school could be a waste of time.

…At least that’s what Emmett had thought while standing in Mr. Nickerson’s classroom. What he was thinking as he walked along a winding, tree-lined street in the town of Hastings-on-Hudson was maybe Zeno hadn’t been so crazy after all.

Zeno’s paradox is thematic in this novel because I spent almost 600 pages wondering whether or not the protagonist and his unlikely band of travelers would get to their planned destination. A valid curiosity when the opening scenes launch the travelers onto a journey 180 degrees opposite from where they had intended to go.

Feels like life.

And Towles cleverly mixes this trip with characters who invoke literary tropes, philosophies and homespun practicality. I haven’t laughed so much wile reading a book since The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood.

For example, Sally, my heroine, could be counted on for her homespun farm girl perspective on life…until she up and did something unexpected. Here’s my favorite pondering from her.

At last week’s Sunday service, Reverend Pike read a parable from the Gospels in which Jesus and His disciples, having arrived in a village, are invited by a woman into her home. Having made them all comfortable, this woman, Martha, retreats into her kitchen to fix them something to eat. And all the while she’s cooking and generally seeing to everyone’s needs by filling empty glasses and getting second helpings, her sister, Mary, is sitting at Jesus’s feet.

Eventually, Martha has had enough and she lets her feelings be known. Lord, she says, can’t you see that my idler of a sister has left me to do all the work? Why don’t you tell her to lend me a hand? Or something to that effect. And Jesus, He replies: Martha, you are troubled by too many things when only one thing is needful. And it is Mary who has chosen the better way.

Well, I’m sorry. But if ever you needed proof that the Bible was written by a man, there you have it.

And then there was Woolly, the detention center escapee who seemed to stumble into trouble out of sheer misguided curiosity, but whose philosophical riffs always hit the mark.

And as much as Woolly had loved the dictionary, he had loathed the thesaurus. Just the thought of it gave him the heebie-jeebies. Because the whole purpose of it seemed to be the opposite of the dictionary’s. Instead of telling you exactly what a word meant, it took a word and gave you ten other words that could be used in its place.

How was one to communicate an idea to another person if when one had something to say, one could choose from ten different words for every word in a sentence? The number of potential variations boggled the mind. So much so that shortly after arriving at St. Paul’s, Woolly had gone to his math teacher, Mr. Kehlenbeck, and asked him if one had a sentence with ten words and each word could be substituted with ten other words, then how many sentences could there be? And without a moment’s hesitation, Mr. Kehlenbeck had gone to the chalkboard, scratched out a formula, and done a few quick calculations to prove incontrovertibly that the answer to woolly’s questions was ten billion. Well, when confronted with a revelation like that, how was one to even begin writing an answer to an essay questions during end-of-term exams?

It seemed that just when I was settling into another deftly crafted scene or newly introduced character, Towles hit me with an idea that was a bit like eating a snow cone too quickly. I felt a sort of brain freeze and had to slow down and think about it, waiting for my brain to warm up again so I could continue processing the story. Here’s one that came from a surprise character, Professor Abernathe.

—However, he continued, having observed that there is enough variety in human experience to sustain our sense of individuality in a locus as vast as New York, I strongly suspect that there is only just enough variety to do so. For were it in our power to gather up all the personal stories that have been experienced in different cities and townships around the world and across time, I haven’t the slightest doubt that doppelgangers would abound. Men whose lives — despite the variation here and there—were just as our own in every material respect. Men who have loved when we loved, wept when we wept, accomplished what we have accomplished and failed as we have failed, men who have argued and reasoned and laughed exactly as we.

The professor looked around again.

—Impossible, you say?

Though no one had said a word.

—It is one of the most basic principles of infinity that it must, by definition, encompass not only one of everything, but everything’s duplicate, as well as its triplicate. In fact, to imagine that there are additional versions of ourselves scattered across human history is substantially less outlandish than to imagine that there are none.

The professor turned his gaze back to Ulysses.

—So, do I think it is possible that your life could be an echo of the life of the Great Ulysses, and that after ten years you could be reunited with your wife and son? I am certain of it.

Right?

Which carried me into that magical week between Christmas and New Year’s where I found myself pondering that possibility.

And if that wasn’t enough, after I closed the cover of the book, late on Christmas night, I immediately googled Fettucine Mio Amore. You’ll have to read the book to understand why. I cooked it for my New Year’s Eve meal, with a very nice bottle of red wine.

Here’s the recipe: Lincoln Highway Fettucine Mio Amore