Okay, so we learn that Jack picks up a man at a gas station in New Mexico while on his way back to Arkansas. Jack notices that the man has a facial twitch, but seems completely unaware of it. Jack, thinking about the twitch, comes to the conclusion that it is a metaphor for the randomness of life. Which is the ideas he had been calming himself with back in California. The ideas which excused him from the responsibility for Willie and Anne’s affair, and he begins to refer to life as the “Great Twitch.”
Jack feels detached from the world because of his new secret knowledge of the Great Twitch. Later, Jack visits Willie and resumes his normal life. He sees Adam Stanton a couple times and even goes to watch him perform a prefrontal lobotomy on a schizophrenic patient which seems to him like another reasoning for the Great Twitch. One night, Anne Stanton calls Jack and asks him meet her at drugstore. She tells him that a guy named Hubert Coffee tried to bribe Adam to throw the building contract for the new hospital to Gummy Larson. Adam did not like this idea at all. He hit the man, threw him out, and wrote a letter of recognition from his position as director of the hospital. Anne begs Jack to convince Adam to change his mind. Jack says that he will try to persuade him, but that he is acting irrationally and may not listen to reason.
He tries to persuade Adam by getting Willie to press charges against Hubert Coffee, convincing Adam that Willie is not corrupt. Anne offers to testify, but, if she did, her affair with Willie would become public, and that kind of does not need to happen. Jack asks Anne why she has put herself into this affair with Willie, and Anne says that she loves him and will marry him after he is elected to the Senate next year.
Willie agrees to press charges against Coffee, and Jack is able to persuade Adam to remain in his position as director of the hospital.
New update Sunday, February 10. We are so close to the end of this book. I’m happy to stop reading, but sad to let the characters go 😦
All The Kings Men 