Review: "The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley" by Hannah Tinti

Hannah Tinti’s second novel The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley might be the biggest surprise for me this year. A few years ago, I read her short story collection Animal Crackers, and to say it did nothing for me would be in understatement, with whatever I didn’t like it about being totally eclipsed by how quickly I forgot about it. But those ill feelings are all but forgotten in this clever, sprawling yet intimate portrait of a father and daughter who are drawn to and seemingly excel at violence and trouble. But for all its blood and guts, which is expertly kept at minimum at the beginning and is slowly ramped up as the story unfolds, I couldn’t help how touched and moved I was by this story, with its twin narratives of two people who grow up with brutality in their bones only to find that the world that has been so cruel to them has kindness and compassion to offer. What it gets right about its subject matter, which blends a nourish approach to the sudden emergence of violence with a quaint, almost Russo-esque setting of New England, reminds me of what a book like Michael Farris Smith’s Desperation Road got wrong. A story like this doesn’t work unless there is a sense of urgency, a sense of danger and a chance for high body count containing characters we have come to love over the course of their narrative, and this book simply does it better than Smith’s sophomore slump. The book focuses on two people, the eponymous man of the title, whose twelve lives are twelve scars he carries around with him, all of which came from him being shot, the other being his daughter Loo, a girl destined to grow into a woman with the violent tendencies of her father. The book is told in alternating chapters. The first concern the present day, where Samuel and Loo now live in Olympus, Massachusetts, the hometown of Loo’s late mother, the other detailing the twelve bullets that have passed through Samuel’s body, each coincidentally coinciding with an important moment in Samuel’s life, like how he met Lily’s Loo’s mother and how he lost her, his moral compass and his unwilling proficiency in killing people. It is no surprise that these two threads eventually collide in predictable but pleasurable ways, but it is very appropriate as well, and the story would not have been complete if they hadn’t. I also enjoyed how Tinti’s subverted a lot of the stereotypes about this story. There are villains, but they are clearly outlined and not who you’d expect, with characters like the buffoonish Jove, Samuel’s partner in crime, Mitchell, Loo’s crush and the love scorned yet compassionate Principal Gunderson (my favorite), who would be viewed negatively in other stories set up like this, but become quiet heroes in this one. Full of intensity, suspense, tragedy and undeniably, on- ironic hope, this is a brilliant second novel from a writer I had mistakenly cast off years ago. 

Rating: 5/5