Hannah Tinti's Blog, page 4
March 17, 2017
Newsday ★ Review
‘The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley’ review:
Hannah Tinti novel finds humanity in criminal father
March 24, 2017 By Dan Cryer Special to Newsday
Hannah Tinti’s first novel was titled “The Good Thief.” It told the story of a 19th century orphan caught up, against his will, with a ragtag band of con men and grave robbers. Her second, “The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley,” depicts a thief in our time who may have goodness in him, but it’s often hard to see.
The novel’s opening line — “When Loo was twelve years old her father taught her how to shoot a gun” — hints at the morally ambiguous territory readers are about to enter. Not that gun ownership is a bad thing, but we quickly learn that Loo’s father, Samuel Hawley, has many guns and has not hesitated to aim them at people. He is a man with many secrets, a man on the run.
Loo (short for Louise) has never known her mother, who died during her infancy. She has spent her young life moving from place to place while her father worked at odd jobs. Now that she’s about to enter her teens, they’ve settled down in her mother’s hometown, the fictional Olympus, Massachusetts, a seaside town of fishermen and waitresses.
Until now, it’s always been just father and daughter, alone in the world. But living in a community reveals Loo’s hot temper and tendency to get into fights. Her brawny father not only earns local celebrity by winning an annual greasy pole competition but arouses suspicion because of all the bullet-wound scars exposed by his shirtless heroics.
In interviews, Tinti has remarked that her novel was inspired by the mythical 12 labors of Hercules, a son of Zeus who killed his wife and children after going insane. To atone for his crimes, he was ordered to perform extraordinary feats of strength against a series of fantastical beasts scattered across the ancient world.
Hawley, too, is a wounded soul, and each of his wounds has a story to tell. His dangerous labors, his “jobs,” are undertaken at the behest of criminals. So, like Hercules, he wanders across the American map from Arizona to Alaska to Wisconsin and so on. The book’s narrative jumps back and forth between these violent scenes and Olympus, where conflict is more prosaic, if still troubling.
Tinti makes each of her crime scenes wildly different yet equally suspenseful. As skillful as she is, she never romanticizes her bad actors. What most deeply interests her is the stumbling, fumbling humanity that results in bad actions.
Hawley is one of those men who can’t fathom how he’s sabotaged his own hopes for a better life. Despite his best intentions — for his wife and daughter — his foolish choices keep tripping him up. “The past is like a shadow,” he laments, always trying to catch up.”
Some observers might brand him a loser. Tinti doesn’t. Like Russell Banks or Richard Russo, she urges us to be open to the humanity beneath the screw-up, the kernel of goodness beneath the lawbreaker. Her ordinary people just want to be loved. A woman who begs Hawley not to kill her husband says, “I’m the only one who knows him.” Of the father who abandoned his family, Loo’s boyfriend grieves, “I don’t think he wanted a family.”
Those yearnings aren’t that different from Loo’s own. Perplexed by the everyday confusions of adolescence, Loo is nonetheless determined to discover the truth about her mother’s death and her father’s past. Along the way, she finds surprising strengths within. Tinti’s own considerable strengths make us care about the outcome. She fuses urgent, vibrant storytelling with a keen understanding of broken people desperate to be whole.
March 13, 2017
Bookpage Review
THE TWELVE LIVES OF SAMUEL HAWLEY
by Hannah Tinti
Dial
$27, 400 pages
ISBN: 9780812989885
Audio, ebook available
Who has more lives than a cat and the bullet scars to prove it? That would be Samuel Hawley, the fascinatingly complicated and morally dubious titular character of Hannah Tinti's gorgeous and gut-wrenching new novel, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley. Having escaped more than his fair share of criminal capers by little more than the skin of his teeth, Hawley has spent most of his life on the lam, pulling up stakes and starting over with his daughter, Loo, whenever a job goes poorly. But when Loo turns 12, Hawley decides a little stability might serve her well and moves them to Olympus, Massachusetts, the small coastal village where Loo's dead mother spent her girlhood. As the two perennial outsiders cautiously become part of a community, the past that Hawley has spent so long running from begins to close in on them. Loo's adolescent misadventures are interspersed with histories of the dozen bullet wounds that decorate Hawley's body, the narrative nimbly flitting between past and present day until the two timelines merge in a deadly and devastating climax. Cinematic in its scope, this expansive novel confidently dwells in the murky liminal spaces of human morality while exploring enduring topics of time, death, love and grief. Tinti has creating a darkly daring (yet oddly uplifting) book that severs as a beguiling study in contrasts and contradictions, one that will leave readers pondering the conundrum of whether her protagonist is a good man who had done bad things or a bad man who has done good things. Expertly infusing old-fashioned storytelling with a modern sensibility, Tinti blends spaghetti Western, literary suspense and mythology to great success. --Stephenie Harrison
Booklist ★ Review
★THE TWELVE LIVES OF SAMUEL HAWLEY
Tinti, Hannah (author)
Mar. 2017. 400p. Dial, hardcover, $27 (9780812989885).
REVIEW. First published January 1, 2017 (Booklist).
Tinti follows her acclaimed first novel, The Good Thief (2008), with another atmospheric, complexly suspenseful saga centered on an imperiled child under the care and tutelage of an outlaw. Sam Hawley’s sole reason for living after the drowning death of his wife, Lily, is his daughter. As for Loo, she is mostly content living on the run with her father, driving cross-country in a truck full of guns and staying in shabby motels in which Sam carefully sets up a bathroom shrine to Lily comprising photographs and her makeup, shampoo, and robe. But as Loo nears 12, Sam decides she needs a more stable life and risks settling down in the coastal Massachusetts town where Lily grew up and where Lily’s angry mother, Mabel, still lives, certain that Sam is responsible for her daughter’s demise. As Loo and Sam take measure of the troubles at hand, Tinti turns back the wheel of time and tells the hair-raising stories of each of the 12 bullet wounds scarring Sam’s battle-ready body. In between these wild flashbacks, Loo comes of age and embarks on her own dangerous escapades. With life-or-death struggles in dramatic settings, including a calving glacier, and starring a fiercely loving, reluctant criminal and a girl of grit and wonder, Tinti has forged a breathtaking novel of violence and tenderness. — Donna Seaman
March 11, 2017
Book Tour!
February 17, 2017
Library Reads #1 Pick
Librarians across the country have picked THE TWELVE LIVES OF SAMUEL HAWLEY as their top book pick for March 2017. Many thanks to all the librarians who voted, and to Dawn Terrizzi from the Denton Public Library in Denton, TX for the write up on the Library Reads homepage!
