If, as a conservative estimate holds, 50,000 novels per annum are published in this country alone, then something beyond a combination of luck, connection, and talent is required to propel a small handful of them to hoopla status as one of the year’s “big books.” Magic, perhaps.

Conjuring literary magic is at once a matter of repetitive practice and the mysterious workings of a telepathic meter for knowing what readers crave. Only then does an author get a shot at a place in the pantheon. With the publication of The Good Thief in 2008 Hannah Tinti ascended to where the air starts getting thin. With her new novel, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, she has reached publishing’s empyrean heights. She has pulled off the writer-magician’s ultimate trick.

An allusion to celestial attainment is more than apt, considering the foundation of her novel’s architecture is built on a modern-day retelling of the Twelve Labors of Hercules. It is also — and here its bona fides as a contemporary literary novel are presented with a flourish — an intricate mélange of propulsive thriller and sophisticated character study, narrated à la mode from shifting points of time and place and dusted lightly with supernatural suggestion. Of the second after a trigger is pulled, we read, “For a brief moment she was nothing but a person in a place and there was no past and there was no future, only this single moment where her life flashed open — and she was awake and she was alive and she was real.” Tinti writes like a sharp lathe cuts.

The titular character, a father on the run from a dark past, possesses a superhero’s ability to have survived explosive dangers. His co-traveler is his young daughter, Loo (short for Louise). As endearing as her father is sadly affecting, she is an obdurate chip off the old block. Loo is introduced in the first pages with a gun in her hand, while a shot from another rings down the final curtain. Symmetry is something of a fixation with the author. Depending on your preferences it will either amaze how many items she can make appear and reappear (leitmotifs run from gun-firing technique to whales to cigarettes, Chinese food, and a medical kit) or become mildly annoying in its stainless showmanship.

Clever of Tinti, too, to have mined ancient mythology, for its all-too-human characters are the richest lode. Like Hercules, Samuel Hawley is a god with a temper. Samuel is often tempted and found unequal to a challenge; he is as strong as he is weak. He is imperfect and he is great, because he allows himself to be transformed by love. This is his ticket to immortality, to Olympus — which is here a fictional town in Massachusetts. As in the myths, the natural world is also imbued with the power of vengeance: the ocean and its denizens swallow people without compunction; the constellations above — a recurrent image in a book replete with decorative and ingeniously deployed symbolism — are wistful stories of error etched permanently in the sky.

The plot contains surprises, the mise-en-scène is full of vibrant visual detail, the characters are idiosyncratic, and the climax is as heartwarming as it is unexpected — Tinti’s novel seems premade for the screen (so long as the cinematic realization is in the hands of a director who can somehow channel Hitchcock, Michael Curtiz, and Ingmar Bergman). It has, naturally, already been optioned.

The screenwriter will need preternatural talent, too, in order to convey the sort of breathtakingly compressed thematic summaries Tinti is wise enough to drop ever so sparingly into the action.

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. Each containing their own unique gravity. Their own force of attraction. Drawing near and holding fast to whatever entered their own atmosphere.

Loo grows into her own maturity as her father reckons with his. With elaborate authorial intention the image of the heart, oversized or beating or stopping with a bang, recurs to a simple but powerful end.

Reaching the end of a novel this meticulously constructed is like standing in the stairwell of a multistory building and looking down the vertiginous drop at the many geometric coils of the stair you climbed to get here. The years Tinti spent working on this novel are reflected in it in both good and bad ways, just as its characters are a seamless mix of morally questionable and hearteningly kind. Every writer is of course the god of her own work, rearranging the landscape of creation and animating all who wander in it. This one is very much like an invaluable pocket watch it describes, timepieces being one of almost too many musically repeated figures, whose worth is dependent on the number of “complications” it contains. (That’s a term both technical and symbolic.) The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley displays such a high degree of polish any trace of the maker’s hand is removed. Every sentence perfect, every circumstance layered with meaning, effect, intrigue, and forward motion. Can a writer be too good? That’s the one question posed by her novel the omnipotent author never foretold.

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For reasons at which I can only guess, a cohort of great English biographers was born in the 1930s and 1940s, among them Claire Tomalin, Michael Holroyd, Hilary Spurling, Selina Hastings, Jenny Uglow, Hermione Lee, Peter Ackroyd, and the recipient of today’s attention, Richard Holmes. Speaking generally, Holmes and the others share a particular sort of empathy with their subjects that — perhaps? — reflects their having come of age as writers in a postwar era of loosening British reticence and, more important, of growing impatience with the notion of empirical objectivity. For Holmes, whose writing career began in the last third of the twentieth century, biography implies a certain intimacy; it is a “handshake across time” and “a simple act of complex friendship.”

Best known for his fine biographies of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Holmes is also the author of any number of other works, including The Age of Wonder on the Romantics’ discovery of the sublimity of science, and now, with the publication This Long Pursuit, three collections of shorter pieces. In “Travelling,” the first chapter in the present book, Holmes writes that empathy is the biographer’s “most valuable but perilous weapon.” Empathy of some sort is a fairly obvious requirement for the biographer of any era, but like all abstract qualities its nature and meaning mutate over the generations. For Holmes, empathy involves more than sympathy or intellectual grasp, but something akin to union. He decided early on that biography demanded that he “physically pursue his subject through the past,” putting himself in every place the subjects lived, visited, passed through, and even dreamed of, to recapture what they experienced.

As he travels and pursues his research through texts, correspondence, journals, and what have you, he engages in “a form of double accounting,” keeping a record of the objective facts of his subject’s life on the right side of a notebook and his own questions, speculations, impressions, emotions — all his reactions and puzzlements — on the left side. In this way he edges into the life, getting as close to his subject’s experience and inner world as possible. In Holmes’s view, biography is a “an act of imaginative faith,” and I would say that it is not given to everyone to pull it off — the faculty is a rare one.

The book includes a chapter on the questions he raised in his own mind in writing The Age of Wonder, which is to say, questions on the relationship of science and creative literature — a subject that I, in a distinct minority, find interesting only in its loonier manifestations. There is an excellent chapter on the teaching of biography writing and the changing nature of biography over time, the latter being one of his persistent themes. There’s another fine essay on memory, which is to say, forgetting; and a chapter on ballooning — the author’s eccentric obsession, about which he wrote his last book, Falling Upwards.

After all this, Holmes gets down to business — his business: biographical writing. In separate chapters he looks at the lives of ten writers who flourished — artistically, if not materially — in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Some are his old pals, notably Shelley, Coleridge, and Wollstonecraft, and in taking them up again he demonstrates how never-ending the writing of one life truly is. In a wonderful essay, “Shelley Unbound,” Holmes discusses the warping effect the actual events in a subject’s life have on our later assessment of that subject. This is a very odd, very astute observation, and one he explores brilliantly in showing how Shelley’s untimely death “was used to define an entire life, to frame a complete biography,” producing “what might be called thanatography.” Prime mover in this respect was Shelley’s friend, “the incorrigible myth-making” Edward John Trelawny, who, over fifty years, continued to rewrite his account of the fatal shipwreck “accumulating more and more baroque details, like some sinister biographical coral reef.”

The emphasis put on the Romantic tragedy of the poet’s death — which Holmes shows to have been the result of imprudence, bad luck, and incompetently altered boat design, rather than destiny — affected not only assessments of Shelley’s character but also how his poems were interpreted, lending them a fatalistic and prophetic import. As a tonic, Holmes throws the Romantic version of Shelley as “a youthful, sacrificial genius” up against an alternate history in which the poet does not die at twenty-nine in 1822. Given the trajectory of his unfinished work and his political beliefs, Shelley, Holmes suggests, would likely have put his pen behind the Reform Bill of 1832, “sharpened up” John Stuart Mill, “hobnobbed with Coleridge at Highgate (‘a little more laudanum, Bysshe?’),” and eventually be “scandalously elected as the first Professor of Poetry and Politics at the newly founded, and strictly secular, University of London.”

In addition to Shelley, Coleridge, and Wollstonecraft, Holmes devotes a chapter to Margaret Cavendish (“Mad Madge”), developing the theme that women, excluded from membership in the Royal Society for 285 years, were more alert than men to the social implications of science. Other chapters cover Isobelle de Tuyll, known as Zélide, and her first biographer, Geoffrey Scott; Madame de Staël and her influence of the Romantics and later writers; Mary Somerville, first to write about science for the common reader; the interpretations and uses of John Keats (though Holmes is strangely silent on the adventures of Keats and Chapman in Myles na Gopaleen’s ludicrous columns in the Irish Times of yore); the portrait painter Thomas Lawrence; and William Blake and the reclamation of his reputation.

Holmes has called himself “an experimental biographer . . . fascinated equally by lives as they are lived, and lives as they are told.” The pieces here are an expression of that, of “the infinitely puzzling difference between chance and destiny in biographical narrative; between the contingent and the inevitable, between the phrase ‘and then . . . ‘ and the phrase ‘and because . . . ‘ ” as each sends the story off in a different direction. Life may be short, but biography never ends.

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On my first day of college in the United States, I got lost. I was, I would later learn, only a few blocks from the off-campus apartment where I was living. I had even walked the route before in an effort to ward off just this possibility. Practice, however, had not made perfect; fresh from Pakistan and weighed down by books, I panicked. Suddenly nothing at all was familiar. After roaming for an hour, and burning with shame, I called someone for help. They arrived in a car and, within five or six blinks of an eye, deposited me outside my building. The lesson I learned from all of this was simply, I must get a car.

It was the wrong lesson. As Lauren Elkin points out in her skillful memoir, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London, “walking is mapping with your feet. It helps you piece a city together.” In turning to a car, that cocoon that would insulate me from the street, I was giving up, refusing both reclamation and transformation, the symbiotic process of changing the city I had moved to and allowing it to change me. In her book, Elkins tackles both; the very term flâneuse is a feminization of the male flâneur, that “dawdling observer usually found in cities.” His literary origins (until recently a flâneur could only be a he) lie in Balzac and Baudelaire; for the latter, the flâneur was an artist who “seeks refuge in the crowd.” Poe and Flaubert added on, the latter using the anonymous face among the throng as an apt figure for his feelings of social discomfiture.

If the flâneur has a long literary history, the flâneuse has been without one. The flâneuse, Elkins notes, is not merely a female flâneur but “a figure to be reckoned with and inspired by. She voyages out and goes where is not supposed to and she forces us to confront how words like ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ are used against women.” Finally, and particularly relevant to writers, the flâneuse is “keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city and the liberating possibilities of a good walk.” We begin in Paris, where Elkins interweaves her own life and love with the work of émigré writer Jean Rhys, whose heroines are similarly given to roaming, to mapping an emotional geography on the terrain of an actual city. Rhys becomes, then, twenty-year-old Elkins’s walking companion, the ill-considered romances of Rhys’s heroines providing emotional precedent for her own doomed relationship with a boy from New Jersey.

Elkins was new to Paris and to walking then. The portion of Long Island where she was raised is a visual desert of car dealerships and strip malls. Yet it is this sparse and unwalkable landscape that is the impetus for her quest to situate exploring on foot as a feminist project. As she says, ” . . . let me walk, let me go at my own pace, let me feel life as it moves through me and around me,” for the “city is life itself.” In ensuing chapters we stroll through Virginia Woolf’s London and Sophie Calle’s Venice, roam with Martha Gellhorn (she risked losing Hemingway to remain a flâneuse), and accompany George Sand on her cross-dressing escapades through Paris. Elkins begins her chapter on London with a quote from Woolf’s diary that captures symbiotic relationship between the writer and her wanderings “Also London itself perpetually attracts,” Woolf writes “gives me a play & a story & a poem without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets.”

Even as she excavates walking women from the past, Elkins is candid also about her failed overtures. London may have been made for here pedestrian explorations, but Tokyo — where she lands after trailing a French boyfriend — is markedly less so. Even as walking has enthralled and empowered her in other places, it deflates her here. The “pure functionalism” of the buildings is depressing, the infantilization of women into a perpetual cuteness is upsetting, and the folk song that plays at five o’ clock each day just bizarre. After many furtive efforts, she likens herself to the heroine of the movie Lost in Translation, trapped in a hotel in a city that refuses to unfold itself, instead wheedling and tempting her to stay indoors. Looking about the sterile hotel apartment, Elkins is led to declare, “All my walks have led to this space, these sixty square meters.” Her persistent sense of displacement never quite goes away, eventually claiming as casualty the relationship that brought her to Tokyo. Elkins packs up and moves back to Paris without her French boyfriend. Cities can provide clues not simply to who you are but also to whom you should give up.

The literary genealogy that Elkins constructs for the walking, idling, loitering, wandering woman in Flâneuse is urgent also for its connection to feminist efforts in places that do not appear in the book. In India for instance, feminists have long argued that the reclamation of urban public space is central to women’s empowerment. In their book Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets, authors Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade underscore just this when they point out that “women cannot claim the right to fun” and how this severely abridges the terms on which they can occupy public spaces. They see loitering, so central to being a flâneuse, as a rebellion against the idea that women’s public presence must be legitimized by purpose and function, often visibly evoking the private spaces where women are actually supposed to be. This same idea of reclamation lies behind “Girls at Dhabas,” a project conjured up by urban Pakistani women who encourage other women to visit and to take and post pictures of themselves at the country’s sidewalk cafés (dhabas). Being seen having fun, in public spaces, is a part of establishing their right to them and to fun in general and of pushing back against religious extremists that see it as a contamination and an abomination. “The flâneuse is fighting to be seen.” Elkins declares early in her book, as these examples attest, for some flâneuserie, is quite literally a fight.

I have walked in nearly all of the cities that appear in Elkins’s book, but I have been, admittedly, a reluctant walker even as I have been a fervid feminist. Like most women, and unlike most men, I located my discomfort in myself: a less than optimal sense of direction, a hyper-vigilance about judgment from others, a susceptibility to seeing every encounter as inflected with danger. In Flâneuse, Elkins undoes women’s penchant for self-blame by revealing feminine discomfort in urban spaces as a product of our exclusion from the right to freely explore them. The consequences go beyond chafing at the boundary: Creativity is the product of an alchemy that involves who we are, what we see and where we see it. Elkins presents an assessment of the cost of staying home, of closing ourselves to the inspirational, generative, or romantic encounter — walled and warded off by getting in a car, or a bus, or a train, by saying no to that risky endeavor: taking a walk.

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