The Hottest State

ethan hawke

Yes, it's "that" Ethan Hawke. Ethan Hawke the actor. In this slim debut novel, he tells a coming-of-age tale of a fairly unpleasant young actor from Texas named William who lives in Manhattan and is working his way through an ugly little relationship with a singer/songwriter named Sarah.

Player of confused but adorable Gen X Romeos in films like Reality Bites and Before Sunrise, Hawke, 25, is easily conjured up as a stand-in for 21-year-old William Harding, the disaffected narrator of this slim first novel, a boy-meets-girl, girl-dumps-boy saga set in a grungy New York of aspiring actors, writers and singers.
That William, a college dropout and budding actor, falls fast and hard for Sarah Wingfield, who fronts a band, teaches preschool and is a bit "funny looking," comes as a revelation to him, given his history of using his good looks for quick sex. Sarah casts William's sexual yearnings and his white trash boyhood into sharp relief by reading Adrienne Rich, toting a list of rape statistics and refusing to sleep with him. Their doomed romance is intercut with William's memories of his parents' breakup, of talks with his best friend and of his overheated teen relationship with Samantha, who still flits in and out of his life.
When Sarah suddenly, inexplicably rejects him after William returns from making a movie in Paris, he descends into self-loathing panic and trashes his apartment. His callow cynicism about women and his flattened out, '90s rendition of Holden Caulfield ("Samantha wanted to have sex. She wasn't doing me any goddamn favors") grow wearisome. But Hawke's emotionally raw account of a world inescapably contracted is oddly affecting and sure to make many a teenage heart go pit-a-pat.

Genres fictionromancecontemporarynovelsthe united states of americaadult fictioncoming of ageamericanadultgerman literature

197 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,1996

This edition

Format: 197 pages, Paperback
Published: January 1, 1996 by Flamingo
ISBN: 9780006550471
ASIN: B007YTNBEM
Language: English

About the author

ethan hawke

Ethan Green Hawke is an American actor, author, and film director. He made his film debut in Explorers (1985), before making a breakthrough performance in Dead Poets Society (1989). Hawke starred alongside Julie Delpy in Richard Linklater's Before trilogy from 1995 to 2013. Hawke received two nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Training Day (2001) and Boyhood (2014) and two for Best Adapted Screenplay for co-writing Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013). Other notable roles include in Reality Bites (1994), Gattaca (1997), Great Expectations (1998), Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007), Maggie's Plan (2015), First Reformed (2017), The Black Phone (2021), and The Northman (2022).
Hawke directed the narrative films Chelsea Walls (2001), The Hottest State (2006), and Blaze (2018) as well as the documentary Seymour: An Introduction (2014). He created, co-wrote and starred as John Brown in the Showtime limited series The Good Lord Bird (2018), and directed the HBO Max documentary series The Last Movie Stars (2022). He starred in the Marvel television miniseries Moon Knight (2022) as Arthur Harrow.
In addition to his film work, Hawke has appeared in many theater productions. He made his Broadway debut in 1992 in Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, and was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play in 2007 for his performance in Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia. In 2010, Hawke directed Sam Shepard's A Lie of the Mind, for which he received a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Director of a Play. In 2018, he starred in the Roundabout Theater Company's revival of Sam Shepard's play True West.
He has received numerous nominations including a total of four Academy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, and a Tony Award.