![the big show john boy and billy the big show john boy and billy](https://www.jokejive.com/images/jokejive/ed/ed79d97688f983e7378cc7c8154298ae.jpeg)
The touches of homespun wisdom, typical of Towles, seemed quirkily sage in the Tolstoy-inspired A Gentleman in Moscow.
#The big show john boy and billy code
Emmett, by contrast, grows to share in the societal code laid down not by police or presidents, but by good plain folk in the community, which Towles thoroughly approves of: “The comfort of knowing one’s sense of right and wrong was shared by another, and thus was somehow more true.” Duchess, like the self-justifying Pastor John, is an outcast, and his remorseless debt-settling is frontier justice personified. Towles delicately links this harsh moral code to the boy’s isolation. Duchess lives by a moral code not far off the Old Testament: an eye for an eye, a whack with a cast-iron skillet for harm done to a friend. The boys cross paths with clowns, hoboes, out-of-work actors, panhandlers, hucksters and just plumb ordinary folksīeyond the picaresque, there are deeper questions of justice here. Pastor John represents the ever-present danger of placing your trust in the wrong authority, a matter Towles touches on more generally by including an atomic bomb drill that prefigured the anxiety and mistrust of the cold war. A crooked preacher named Pastor John is the worst of the lot, straight out of The Night of the Hunter, quoting Bible verses even as he plots to steal Billy’s collection of silver dollars. Pleasingly, the boys cross paths with a varied cast of characters: clowns, hobos, out-of-work actors, panhandlers, home-makers, hucksters and just plumb ordinary folk. He leads Emmett and Billy a fine dance across the north-eastern US, with his sidekick, lost soul Woolly, simply hoping for a good meal and a safe home. Duchess, though likable and quick-witted, is hopelessly untrustworthy. Duchess and Woolly, also 18, are driving it to New York City to raid Woolly’s trust fund and settle a few scores. But there’s a hitch: Emmett’s beloved powder-blue Studebaker has been “borrowed” by a couple of boys on the run from the work farm. His father has died, and his younger brother, Billy, is keen for the two of them to head to California in search of their mother, who walked out eight years ago. It is 1954, and 18-year-old Emmett Watson has just finished a spell at the Kansas work farm where he was sent after accidentally killing a bully. Hundreds of miles roll by over the course of The Lincoln Highway, a breezy Bildungsroman meets road trip that suits the Boston-born Towles’s expansive, folksy, anecdotal style down to the ground. For his latest, Towles has looked to the open road. T he hero of Amor Towles’s previous novel, the multimillion-selling A Gentleman in Moscow, spent 480 pages cooped up in a posh hotel, unable to leave on pain of death – a luxury lockdown.