BookBrowse Reviews The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti

BookBrowse:

A coming-of-age novel and a literary thrill ride about the price we pay to protect the people we love most.

Hannah Tinti follows her spectacular 2008 debut, The Good Thief, with a novel of uncommon imagination: a coming-of-age story, but one interwoven with a remarkable thriller and a likable but corrupt anti-hero, a taker named Samuel Hawley who adheres to a hard moral code of his own making.

With his long-time partner, Jove, Hawley works outside the law, mostly for people who also live beyond the borders of legality. His clients want something, and the method of retrieval is irrelevant to them. Perhaps it's an object a thief has purloined. Perhaps the thing desired has changed hands through chicanery. Pay a fee, and Hawley and Jove will find it and bring it to you.

Jove has neither friend nor family other than Hawley, but the widowed Hawley has his daughter Loo (Louise). In Hawley's world, Loo's safety and happiness are paramount. The plot moves along swiftly, Hawley's "lives" of the title measure out in gunshot wounds he has suffered over the years, and the circumstance for each wound is covered in a flashback. This includes the injury he suffered when he met his wife, Lily, her nature eccentric, her history troubled by alcohol, her love for Hawley so fierce she shot him to stop him from committing murder. There's an arc to the intense narrative as Hawley reflects back over twenty years, holding within it a distinct coming-of-age story about Loo as a hero-worshipping young girl on the cusp of womanhood, someone seeking a measure of reconciliation for the flawed man her father became after his own troubled childhood. "I was young. And I didn't know what a life can mean in this world."

The story ranges from Alaska to Washington and to random places across the United States before finally reaching its climax in the fictional seaside fishing town of Olympus, Massachusetts. Tinti captures the ambience perfectly, both in expectation and reality. It's in Olympus that Loo forms herself into a woman and Hawley learns he cannot protect her forever. Olympus is also Hawley's late wife's hometown, a place where her mother, Mabel, still lives, a woman who hates Hawley. Tinti's descriptions of the heterogeneous, gossip-powered small town life are fully realized, but even better are her vivid sketches of Hawley and Loo prowling the early morning beaches at low tide for clams and crabs and mussels. Tinti also does well in holding up to the light Hawley's quirks: the near paranoid watchfulness that's kept him alive during twenty years of banditry; his armory of weapons; hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash stored in glass jars; but most of all, the patient wariness of a wolf, a man forever relying on plans made chess-like three steps ahead.

Tinti's secondary characters both expand and deepen the story. Jove is the perfect good-hearted sidekick; he boosts Hawley's confidence, and is more outgoing and carefree. Mabel constantly seeks ways to help young Loo but is frustrated by the girl's deep, protective love for her father. Mary Titus is a hippie earth mother waitress-environmental activist who takes out her hatred of the sea by petitioning government agencies for the termination of cod fishing, which is the town's primary economic engine. Mary is also the mother of Loo's first serious boyfriend, a hit-and-miss romance complicated by self-consciousness, overreaching, and parents.

Tinti is a writer gifted beyond her years, both literary in her perceptions – "the sailboat passed a cargo ship the length of an aircraft carrier, stretching across the surface like a giant guarding the edge of the world" – and possessing a thoroughgoing comprehension of the human condition, our sometimes desperate search for love and family, the rage we often feel as we stumble through our ignorance and past our fear to confront our mortality.

Far more violent than Paper Moon, far kinder than The Road to Perdition, Tinti's The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley stands as a singular literary achievement.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in April 2017, and has been updated for the February 2018 edition. Click here to go to this issue.