![]() He is the type of person who provides nuanced ethical reasoning before striking someone in the skull with a two-by-four or a frying pan. Duchess is a persuasive and original figure, an avenging moral accountant with a ledger of debts to collect (and occasionally to pay). ![]() “Ta-da!” says one, Duchess, the resourceful son of a vaudevillian, as Emmett discovers him in the barn. In the universe of this novel, grit and integrity and determination matter, not because they get you where you want to go but because they allow you to persist when you’re inevitably blown off course by chance, vicissitude and the disruptive schemes of fellow questers.Ībout those fellow questers: There were, it turns out, a couple of stowaways, Emmett’s former bunkmates at the work farm, in the trunk of the kind warden’s car. It doesn’t matter that his plan is lawful, well conceived, well researched. This was clear when the mouthy kid he punched at the county fair stumbled backward, tripped over a cable, struck his head on a concrete block and died 62 days later - “the ugly side of chance,” the warden tells Emmett - and it’s equally clear when he returns home to consider his future. Though capable and self-reliant, Emmett is hardly the master of his own destiny. It’s a sentimental as well as practical choice, home to his mother, who left the family years earlier, sending back postcards from locales along the Lincoln Highway during her journey west. ![]() After a morning spent in the library with the Encyclopaedia Britannica - it’s 1954 - he decides that California is the more promising place. His decision to start fresh leads to a second choice - Texas or California? Trained as a carpenter, Emmett seeks a destination with a rapidly growing population where he can make a living flipping houses. Facing foreclosure on the family farm and violent retribution from the family of the bully he accidentally killed at the fairgrounds, Emmett has an immediate and stark choice - should he stay or should he go? Upon the death of his father from cancer, 18-year-old Emmett Watson is released early from a juvenile work farm in Kansas and driven home by a kind warden to a small town in Nebraska, where he is reunited with his precocious 8-year-old brother, Billy. Amor Towles’s third novel begins with a deceptively straightforward premise.
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