Ash Wednesday

Not bad! Guess Hawke does it better this time !

Was this written by Ethan Hawke or Jesse? Is there a difference?

How can characters who are so multi-layered and so well-developed somehow be problematic?

The problem is that the two characters at the center of this book -- the fledgling couple Jimmy and Christy -- are flaky (or eccentric if you prefer a term with a positive connotation). The problem is that eccentric people are always interesting -- but for arbitrary reasons. They are quitting jobs, doing drugs, getting married, quitting drugs, finding God, cleaning up their bad habits, starting up new bad habits, all for reasons that are hard to relate to. They are anti-heroes in their flakiness (Achilles, the Greek hero of the “Iliad,” is the classic example of flakiness -- refusing to fight a war out of stubborn pride).

Both characters are likable in their own ways, but this likeability is overwhelmed by their unlikeable flakiness. In so many ways these are people you know -- people who seem very talented but can’t get out of their own way and inexplicability do dumb things. I’ve worked in education, so I meet these people all the time. It’s too frustrating and normal to be tragic. It’s mostly just frustrating.

Flaky characters present a particularly difficult problem for fiction. Fictional characters are often expected to go through some kind of meaningful change. But though eccentric characters change all the time, can their changes be described as meaningful?

It’s also the reason artists’ lives are rarely interesting, at least beyond short anecdotes. Hang out with someone like Andy Warhol for a night and it’s a story. Hang out with him for a year and it’s an ordeal.

Now that I have that (major) gripe out of the way, there is another secret to this book. Every reviewer is bound to underrate it because it’s written by Ethan Hawke. It’s easy to dismiss this book as the amateurish work of a vain actor, with a main character that mirrors many of his slacker roles (these reviews are in no short supply on Goodreads). But once you get beyond the Hawke name, the big secret of this book is that it is very finely crafted. The story is disciplined, every chapter works as a short story, polished and refined. The characters are well thought out. If anything, the story seems too deliberate and perhaps a tad overwritten. These faults, however, are the signs of an author who is trying to overcompensate for the missteps of a previous work (I haven’t read Hawke’s first book so this is just my guess.

What does this amount to then? A great book and a great second step in the maturity of a writer.

So where is the third book? Did Hawke give up after this one? Did he write a third book but never publish it? Or did he realize the overwhelming disadvantage of publishing under the Hawke name? Perhaps there is a third Hawke book out there hidden under pseudonym.

Is that all I have to say about this book? Well, not quite. I will be blasphemous. I will use Hawke and Hemingway in the same review. And why not? In some parts of this book, the characters disgusted me. This seems like a sin -- and then I remembered that Hemingway could disgust me. “The Sun Also Rises” had absolutely disgusting characters doing disgusting things, and I still think of it as a classic “youth and its discontents” novel. Can a good novel make you feel dread? Yes! Ash Wednesday at one point evoked a terrible sense of dread -- a sense that things couldn’t work out for the characters. This was the same feeling I had reading “To Have and Have Not,” a book I finished in two nights.

There is a manic energy that drives this book. “It’s amazing anyone lives to thirty” the young male protagonist says at one point. I used to feel exactly the same way. The characters, these two young characters who evoke dread and disgust, are people I know. They are EXACTLY like people I know. That makes the book necessary, horrible to read, and invigorating.

Is it possible to give a flawed book five stars? Sure it is. When you’re young and starting out as a novelist, you can only write imperfect novels. But this is a very, very good one.

Excellent character development! Ethan Hawke really knows how to reach the core of human feelings. I have always enjoyed his acting career, so thought I would try one of his novels.

I had heard that actor Ethan Hawke was a decent writer, so I paid the end-of-the-day League of Women Voters $5 a bag price and threw in Hawke’s Ash Wednesday (2002, 221 pages). I wouldn’t call Hawke a great stylist, but like many actors he does his homework. In 2022, he was a young whelp of 32 and something of a Generation X icon. Ash Wednesday could be seen as a dressed-down version of the role he played in the 1995 film, Before Sunrise, though no one would necessarily confuse the novel’s Christy with Julie Delpy. Both Before Sunrise and Ash Wednesday, though, are about the heat of romantic passion and the desperation felt by the realization that the respective relationships are inherently doomed. Jimmy is a working class kid who falls hard for Christy, messes things up, gets her pregnant, and gets her back by going AWOL from the Army. Theirs is a high-speed road trip romance in a souped-up Chevy Nova that begins in Albany and ends up in Texas via New Orleans. Jimmy’s inexperienced and perhaps not all that bright and Christy is a wild child who might be bipolar. Neither is ready for adulthood. The language is rough in places, but Hawke had an ear for Gen X ‘Tude-speak. Not fine literature but a breeze of a read. ★★★ ½
--Rob Weir

Hawke can masterfully create faulty, unreliable characters. They are toxic, yet so utterly human. Men you never want to meet but are surrounded by, or maybe you even are one of them. Modern naturalism.

I really loved this book, my first of Ethan Hawke, I love Road movie, , and I adored this "road book"n the journey of Jimmy and Chrissy to marriage, true adulthood and parenthood. facing their feelings, their doubts and their dreams. facing their pasts and their longing for praise by her father (for Chrissy) or understanding. I loved the description of New Orleans and the different places. i was living their journey as if I was in a theater watching a movie.
really a wonderful read.

Started slow, began to meander, but finished on a really good note.

(FYI: Yes I know we're supposed to be in 'Nonfiction November' right now, but I was feeling all grumpy and sore when I woke up today, and the task of sorting out a pile of 'maybes' for my NFN TBR pile was getting really exhausting, so I just grabbed this slim volume that I'd read before, and allowed myself a little bit of fiction just once. #WhateverGetsYouThroughTheNight)

I think I picked this book up in a bargain-bin in a book-store, purely because I saw Ethan Hawkes' name on it and was curious to see if the guy was as good a writer as he was an actor. (I'd always found him kinda cute: quirky and intelligent; interesting to watch on screen. And of course, having seen him playing a writer in 'Sinister' I could sort of imagine him sitting down at a typewriter to bleed as he knocked out this book.)

If you've seen Hawke in any of the 'Before Sunrise' or 'Before Sunset' films, you'll know pretty much how the banter between our main characters plays out. Both parties are somehow super-ironic, post-modern, quickly-cynical, and yet incredibly romantic at heart. In 'Ash Wednesday' it was as if I was reading a book set back in New Jersey in the 1980s. It's Tommy and Gina all over again (if Tommy was actually AWOL from the military and Gina was Uma Thurman - sorry Ethan, but the comparisons were too frequent and too immediately recognisable for her not to have been loosely drawn around your wife at the time of this book going to publish; never mind that she would have been pregnant with your son Levon whilst you were writing 'Ash Wednesday'. Heck, knowing how long some authors take to write a book, you could even have been observing her pregnant with Maya a few years earlier too. But I guess it doesn't matter exactly when and what instance was giving you inspiration: the fact is, you're not just writing about what you know here, but who you know. Can't say I'd want to try to try an immortalise any snapshot of my family life, like insects trapped forever in amber. But if you and your ex-missus are okay with it, who am I to judge?

Everything in this book feels dusty. Like the air is so arid it might just cause your lungs to burn, until we get to Louisiana and then it's all humidity and uncomfortable heat, to aggravate all the impossibly happy people celebrating in the carnival. It's really only at this point that things start to ramp up a little after a really slow-burn, and we finally get to see who each of the characters are as fully fledged people. I can see what it is that scares them, excites them and upsets them. Before this point it's a lot of back and forth, with two rather unlikeable characters expressing themselves with the intellectual insouciance and dark cynicism that many of the late boomer / early Gen-X-ers would often vacillate between. The dialogue isn't the most realistic, but it's sometimes fun to read on a page, where all the punctuation shows the reader exactly where all the emphasis lies within each character's outburst.

It often feels more as if Jimmy & Christy are performing monologues - only they end up talking over one another - than speaking, listening and engaging in any real conversation. They both know what they want to do, but aren't exactly convinced that the other has made a definite decision, so we often end up veering off a little from what ought to have been a very well planned itinerary, for a very important trip. It doesn't bode well for one potential outcome when the "flying-by-the-seat-of-one's-pants" approach leaves them stranded in New Orleans during Mardis Gras, with no hotel rooms booked, no idea where they're going to go or what they're going to do. This is typical of Jimmy, who has yet to step up and embrace the maturity and masculinity required to be a man...much to Christy's increasing chagrin

But it's in Louisiana that with Jimmy's vulnerability, combined with his determination to be a better guy for Christy, there seems to be something of a heavy blanket lifted off of this story. All at once I found myself thinking back to certain sentences or paragraphs that I'd read earlier in the book, and I was able to see that on top of there being some deeply woven threads of foreshadowing in there, there was an earnestness that I think I'd missed in Jimmy's thoughts / speech; I'd written him off as a dumb young guy who was flaky and irritating. But he'd been filled with more and more emotions as this trip began. And being a young man he'd simply been trying to couch the sincerity of his feelings in a hard outer shell of sarcasm, cynicism, and nihilism.

I really loved the way everything came together at the exact right time, without actually telling us too much about what happened next. So it wasn't a HEA but more of a "let's hope everything works out well for them" - and that's much more preferable to someone like me, whose own Gen-X heart rarely skips a beat at the sight, sound or storytelling of anything too twee or romantic.

I'm really doing my best to not give any spoilers here, so I know this might all sound wildly batshit, but this isn't a long book. Nor is it difficult to read. In fact it has some genuinely unique insights and perspectives peppered throughout all of the other "slacker-nihilist" schtick. But whereas the first part of the book left me feeling nothing but the desperate need to get it all over with, I'm glad I did stick with it, because both of our characters seem to go on a kind of redemption arc towards the end of the book. And at one point something akin to emotion sorta kicked me in the guts. I floated through those final chapters, misty eyed by the end felt as though I'd been on an emotional rollercoaster throughout the whole book...I just hadn't realised the effect that the earlier chapters had been having on my subconscious.

Is it the greatest piece of fiction every written? Hell no. Was I expecting this to be a weak celebrity offering? Hmm....yeah, kind of. Was I wrong to write it off so soon? Absolutely. Should you give this book a try? Yes.

I'm a sucker for any scenes in a book set in Louisiana anyway to be honest, but it had a greater meaning by the end of the book than I expected to find at the beginning. Yes that Ethan Hawke way of being almost artificially articulate and effortlessly erudite, despite his character not being someone whom we are expected to believe would communicate with such deftly clever, obviously choreographed arguments, is little jarring at first. But you get used to it. And you also start to warm to both of our main characters as the story progresses...to the point where by the end you can't help but find yourself rooting for them.

So, not earth-shattering or mind-blowing, but a pleasant enough read that gets better the longer you stay with it.