New York, NY: The Dial Press, 2017. 400 pages. $27.00.
Hannah Tinti’s second novel, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, is a story about love, grief, and getting by when love and grief hurt too much. Samuel Hawley is a white American single father who has raised his young daughter Loo on the road, crisscrossing the United States in his truck and living out of motel rooms. When she turns twelve, he decides it’s time she has a proper home and settles down in Loo’s deceased mother’s hometown by the sea, where Loo’s grandmother Mabel Ridge still lives, so that Loo can grow up like a “normal” teenager.
The book’s chapters alternate between Loo’s coming of age and Hawley’s sordid past. And as everyone familiar with Faulkner knows, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In this book, the past lives and breathes as Hawley does, in the scars on his body from twelve bullets, but also in the way he mourns his only love. As Loo grows, she learns more about her mother’s life and death, and just who her father was before she was born and is now.
Like Tinti’s celebrated debut novel The Good Thief, Samuel Hawley is rife with adventure, mythology, and stylistic storytelling, which is to say the story and its characters are engaging, active, and capacious. It is an old tale newly told by an author who knows how to marry past with present to build momentum and create characters who are as specific as they are larger-than-life. She sets the novel in the fictional town of Olympus, Massachusetts, and makes the myth of Hercules all her own, offering it to Loo as her inheritance. Tinti, cofounder and executive editor of the literary magazine One Story, is a master craftsperson and editor.
She is also a self-professed perfectionist, which paradoxically may be what yields the book’s few flaws. Samuel Hawley is so meticulously crafted, it’s airtight. Everything from the sentences to the story structure are expertly fine-tuned, including and especially Loo’s transition from a girl to a young woman. For instance, Loo works at the local diner and takes on some extra tables for her fellow server, Agnes, who’s pregnant.
In exchange, Agnes, showed Loo how to apply liquid eyeliner, standing side by side in the Sawtooth’s bathroom mirror, elbows braced to steady their hands. It was the same way that Loo’s father had taught her to hold a gun . . . The black lines made Loo’s eyes seem different, although she was not sure they were beautiful. It was more like she was meeting a stranger who had stolen her face. This stranger talked back to the chefs, joked with the customers more easily and worked harder than Loo had ever worked before, the frenzy of the weekend crowd swirling like fireflies that she danced around and slid between and guided through to the end of the night.
The writing moves like this, propulsively, and the story is building layer by layer on every page. This is praiseworthy but also oddly unsettling. It’s like a gift so beautifully wrapped you’re afraid to cut the ribbon and tear the paper, so you peel the tape and slide the gift out gingerly, all the while more concerned with the package than the present inside. Tinti describes the titular character as such:
Hawley was in his forties but looked younger, his hips still narrow, his legs strong. He was as tall as a longboat, with wide shoulders that sloped from the years of driving his truck back and forth across the country with Loo in the passenger seat. His hands were callused from the day jobs he’d work from time to time—fixing cars or painting houses. His fingernails were lined with grease and his dark hair was always overgrown and tangled. But his eyes were a deep blue and he had a face that was rough and broken in a way that came out handsome. Wherever they had stopped on the road, whether it was for breakfast at some diner on the highway, or in a small town where they’d set up for a while, Loo would notice women drifting toward him. But her father would make his mouth go still and set his jaw and it kept anyone from getting too close.
It’s an expert thumbnail description, but it’s also a little too close for comfort to central casting. Of Loo, Tinti writes, “By this time Loo was twelve and a half years old and nearly as tall as a grown woman. She carried the rough-and-tumble look of children being raised by men, but she also seemed clean even when her face was dirty.” Why not let her seem dirty, if and when she is?
Though the book’s characters act impulsively, there’s a moment of recklessness missing from the experience of reading their story. Writers often talk about how they intend their stories to go one way but the narrative or one of the characters takes over and does something unexpected, which is, of course, silly. Stories and characters do not surprise a writer; her subconscious does. But Samuel Hawley feels like a conscious effort through and through: twelve bullets for the twelve labors of Hercules and the twelve numbers on the face of a clock, and so on. This is too many bullets, especially since we know most of them will not take his life. That’s not giving anything away—it’s simply the rules of the narrative, from which there is no escape.
It’s spellbinding to read such a remarkably cohesive narrative that honors the reader’s close attention and rewards her continued investment by ensuring that everything does have meaning, particularly one with an ending that satisfies that age-old paradox of unexpected and inevitable. Hawley’s past converges with his present—and Loo’s—making for a gripping finale.
Tinti does everything right, which feels a little wrong. Like the number of bullets Hawley takes, everything about the book is filled with meaning, which makes the story both mesmerizing and overwhelming. During a trip to the local whaling museum, Loo is bullied and climbs into a giant replica of a whale’s heart. During an annual community gathering, the Greasy Pole Contest, Mabel Ridge knits as she watches the spectacle: “She wound the thread around her finger, then stabbed it with the hook, drawing the metal in and out and around and then tugging the knot in to place. She made another knot and then another. One for each man on the mast. And as each team failed, she spun the square she was making and started a new row.” Tinti manages to make even a grandma knitting menacing with perfect language, but she also makes it hard to buy, given the precision of the detail, a knot for each man on the mast, no more, no less.
While Tinti doesn’t glorify violence, she does render Hawley and Loo’s care and feel for guns as romantic, noble. Learning to use firearms is an extension of their animal instincts and prowess, and teaching others to shoot serves as a form of communion. In that sense, Samuel Hawley is a very American story. Tinti also addresses class and some other complex social issues, from alcoholism to environmental degradation, with subtlety, ceding top priority to story. One of the novel’s subplots involves a petition to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that seeks to stop commercial overfishing of Atlantic codfish by turning an area off the coast of Olympus into a marine sanctuary. Tinti makes use of the interesting tensions this creates in a local economy based on fishing without distracting from what propels the characters forward.
Reading the novel right now, it’s difficult, to say the least, to read about a white man who takes a dozen bullets—not one from a law enforcement agent—and survives while black and brown people are being shot and killed in the US for being black and brown. Hawley commits many crimes throughout the narrative, but the law is the least of his problems.
Tinti gives us enough signals that she is writing about a contemporary, multiethnic United States. Of the Hawleys’ time on the road, she writes, “It didn’t matter if they were in California or Oklahoma. They could always find a Fortune Palace. Fried egg rolls and wonton soup and scallion pancakes and hoisin sauce were Loo’s comfort foods.” A few kids at Loo’s new school have names that sound Korean and Indian—they are among a group that Loo scrapes with, as she is the outcast, the underdog, the new kid, the stranger who comes to town.
And yet, other than their hankering for westernized Chinese food, Loo and her father harbor no conscious or unconscious biases, and the world around them is frictionless when it comes to race. Perhaps the central characters are too preoccupied with their outsider status. The author seems to want to have it both ways, romantic white characters who benefit greatly from their whiteness, but have no inner world when it comes to who and what they encounter in a contested American public. This type of neutralization might be acceptable in a different type of novel, but in a story that traverses the country and centers violence and guns, it is, in these times, negligent to avoid fully realizing these characters on the page by not endowing them with any beliefs related to politics or identity.
Part of the project of appropriating an old story should be to interrogate its assumptions and absences. Loo is a fresh addition to the tale of Hercules, but the decision to exempt one’s realist story from the reality of race is, unfortunately, not fresh at all.
The novel is at its best when Hawley and Loo are most in their bodies. This tends to occur when they are in danger or vulnerable with their lovers, Lily and Marshall, respectively. Loo goes from being the victim of bullying at school to a tough girl who strikes first and hard, and continues to mature as she experiences friendship and intimacy in a way she never has before. All along, we witness a nuanced, complicated growth underway internally.
Tinti writes of one of Loo’s first sexual experiences,
An unsettling sense of vertigo flooded her mind just as it did whenever she stretched out on her roof at night and stared at the stars for too long, her body spinning upward into the depths of the velvet sky, until up was no longer up and down was no longer down and she wasn’t a single, tiny insignificant being anymore but the entire earth, hurtling through space, tilting past comets and meteors and blocks of ice that fractured into crystals and left streaks behind in the darkness.
While the reader might have to suspend disbelief that the characters are truly experiencing what Tinti describes in certain instances, her writing about the ways in which they feel connected to the stars, sky, sea, and landscape, the ancient bodies surrounding their own, is transformative.
Ultimately, while Samuel Hawley may be intricately constructed, some moving, messy questions arise toward the end of the novel and linger for the reader to turn over long after the story ends. We may not be certain what the future holds for Loo, but we will certainly keep rooting for her on the hero’s journey.
