A Coming of Age Adventure
by Lucy S
"The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley is one part Quentin Tarantino, one part Scheherazade, and twelve parts wild innovation.” Ann Patchett
Hannah Tinti’s notable, gritty, first novel, The Good Thief was very well received in 2008 and those who have been waiting for more from her will not be disappointed with her second accomplishment, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley.
Samuel Hawley is a lifetime criminal who realizes he needs to change his felonious ways when his daughter, Loo, reaches adolescence and starts acting the part of a delinquent as well. Though Loo is happy to follow her father in all he does, Samuel feels compelled to settle down for her sake. When Samuel and Loo move to Olympus, Massachusetts, the town where Loo’s mother lived, Loo becomes curious about how her mother died. All Loo knows of her mother are the relics that her father carries and sets up in a shrine wherever they relocate. Loo has trouble letting go of the old, peripatetic ways and adapting to life in Olympus. “She began to dread the moves but a part of her also itched for them, because it meant that she could stop trying to fit in and simply slip into the place where she belonged: the passenger seat of her father’s truck as they barreled down the highway.”
Instead of making friends in Olympus, Loo sets out to learn more about what really happened to her mother. As she unravels the mystery of her mother’s past she becomes more deeply involved in her father’s present. Loo starts to comprehend what the twelve scars on her father’s body truly indicate about who he is and the life he’s led.
Interspersed with the chapters that tell of Loo’s adolescence and adjustment to her new home, are chapters set in earlier times that tell us of the harrowing adventures that comprise “the twelve lives of Samuel Hawley,” one chapter for each bullet that has left its mark on his scarred body. The chapters alternate between past and present in a wide setting that spans the entire United States, from Alaska to Massachusetts.
In an interview at the end of the book, Tinti explains how she created Samuel Hawley. She imagined a man blemished by bullets, and as he appeared to her bullet hole by bullet hole she created her story. Each of the chapters describing one of Hawley's wounds contains similar thematic elements. Tinti was influenced by Greek mythology and builds for Hawley a set of Herculean tasks, essentially, twelve different ways of getting shot. Loo, as she matures, is also on an odyssey. Each “first” in her life lies in a chapter sandwiched between the details of her father’s escapades. Her experiences, from her first fight, to her first crime, bring her closer to her father and to understanding the intentions of the people around her. “Their hearts were all cycling through the same madness - the discovery, the bliss, the loss, the despair - like planets taking turns in orbit around the sun.”
Tinti interweaves violence and compassion in this book that is part mystery, part quest for truth, and part love story. The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley is a gunslinging tale of adventure dovetailed with a powerful account of a father’s love as Samuel Hawley struggles with whether to teach his daughter by word or deed. “It was like they were one person, not two. When he thought, Loo acted.”
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