{"id":6663,"date":"2017-05-31T07:40:12","date_gmt":"2017-05-31T11:40:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6663"},"modified":"2017-05-31T07:40:12","modified_gmt":"2017-05-31T11:40:12","slug":"the-twelve-lives-of-samuel-hawley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6663","title":{"rendered":"*****The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley"},"content":{"rendered":"
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photo: Lorena a.k.a. Loretahur<\/p><\/div>\n

By Hannah Tinti \u2013 Samuel Hawley wears the evidence of his past brushes with death on his skin, in the form of scarred-over bullet wounds that are the organizing principle of this fine book. Chapters describing the circumstances under which he got \u201cBullet Number One,\u201d etc., are interspersed with chapters about his peaceful, if not uneventful, life with his late wife Lily and daughter Loo. Although Hawley is a criminal and the book details his many crimes, it\u2019s also about love and retribution. It\u2019s about universals as ancient as the twelve labors of Hercules.<\/p>\n

Many chapters are told from the third-person point of view of the adolescent Loo. Typical of teenagers, she is mostly uncurious about her father\u2019s past, accepting his scars and his affinity for firearms as merely the familiar backdrop of her own story. When the book opens, he\u2019s retired from his life of crime, yet its first lines are \u201cWhen Loo was twelve years old her father taught her how to shoot a gun.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hawley had a couple of misspent decades, starting with an armed robbery when he was a runaway teenager. His escapades were mostly as muscle-and-gun-for-hire on behalf of someone else, and several of them involved the acquisition of rare and costly timepieces. Gold pocket watches with diamond and sapphire star charts embedded in the case, a rare and ancient water clock called a clepsydra. Hawley hauled the cash, made the trade, returned with the goods. If only it always went that smoothly.<\/p>\n

Tinti\u2019s choice of time-pieces, and a few other recurrent themes in the narrative\u2014celestial navigation, a great humpback whale, even water\u2014give the book depth and resonance. If you prefer to focus on the fates of Loo and her father, both terrifically engaging characters, these themes do not intrude. (Apparently, the novel has already been optioned for television.)<\/p>\n

Loo and Hawley have a strong, believable, and loving relationship, but their interactions with Lily\u2019s mother, Mabel Ridge, are far more prickly and at times hilarious. When Lily had arranged for Hawley to meet her mother the first time, she was rightly apprehensive, but he was so in love with her, he was willing to face that Gorgon. \u201c\u2018Right now,\u2019 said Lily, \u2018I\u2019m glad you don\u2019t have any parents.\u2019 \u2018Me, too,\u2019 said Hawley. But he was lying. There\u2019d been plenty of times over the past six months when he\u2019d wished he had someone to show Lily off to.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tinti\u2019s writing is full of similarly honest, unsentimental devotion. The only time his bond with Loo is seriously threatened is when the troublemaking Mabel Ridge makes a devastating accusation against him. When Loo confronts him, Hawley reacts in a way only this deeply imagined character could.<\/p>\n

Tinti effectively describes their coastal people whose lives depend on the cold bite of the Atlantic Ocean and a continuing supply of fish. Among the townspeople is a lone, but inevitable woman doggedly advocating for making the locals\u2019 fishing grounds\u2014the Bitter Banks\u2014a marine sanctuary. If you want to turn yourself into a hometown pariah, this is a good strategy.<\/p>\n

Loo finally comes to understand the woman and her motivation, one that could serve as \u00a0a summary of the whole book: the desperate need to be loved. She sees that people\u2019s hearts are \u201ccycling through the same madness\u2014the discovery, the bliss, the loss, the despair\u2014like planets taking turns in orbit around the sun.\u201d This desperation is as true for Hawley, with the ever-present likelihood his crimes will one day catch up to him, as for any of them. Or us.
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By Hannah Tinti \u2013 Samuel Hawley wears the evidence of his past brushes with death on his skin, in the form of scarred-over bullet wounds that are the organizing principle of this fine book. Chapters describing the circumstances under which … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,40,126],"tags":[1047,1048,1046],"class_list":["post-6663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-fiction","category-reading-2","tag-hannah-tinti","tag-new-england","tag-twelve-lives-of-samuel-hawley"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1Jt","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6663"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6663\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6665,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6663\/revisions\/6665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}