I actually ddin't even finish this, but got halfway through and realized that I didn't care one way or the other about it's characters, at which point i figured it would be a waste of good reading time to force myself through it.

was a good book, but not great, not a 5 star for sure, easy read though

I read the beginning, but got tired of the swagger, and so skipped to the end. I want to like your books, Ethan Hawke, but I wasn't feeling this one today.

In the name of honesty I will tell you that I was skeptical going in... because he's Ethan Hawke, a guy who probably wanted to add "novelist" to his already long and gorgeous resume.

More honesty: Two chapters in I realized that I needed to carry a notebook because I had to pull over constantly to rewind the audio (do we still call it rewinding?) and write down my favorite passages. There were so so many.

"To love each other and live in the truth. To not lie at all. To maintain a perspective on the other and not wholly judge them in context to yourself..."

Suffice it to say I think Ethan Hawke is brilliant. He reignited the romantic in me, someone I thought was dead. I will eventually buy this book and highlight three quarters of it.

Brief synopsis: The story of Jimmy, a drug using soldier who is still reeling from his father’s death not long before, fiercely in love with Christy, who having discovered she is pregnant with Jimmy’s baby then having him break up with her before she tells him, decides ro flee Albany and return to Houston where her politician father lives whom she hasn’t seen in two years after their estrangement. Jimmy chases.

I first read this not long after it came out, as I had previously read Hawke’s first novel, The Hottest State, and enjoyed it. My recollection over twenty years later was that I did not like Ash Wednesday much, finding the two main characters not only mostly unlikable (annoying I think) but also not interesting. I usually need one or the other from my main characters. I just reread The Hottest State last year (I’d kept that book, but did not keep Ash Wednesday) and decided to pick up a used copy of Ash Wednesday and give it another read wondering if this older more well read version of myself might like it more.

The main charcters Jimmy and Christy were as I had remembered; hard to like. Jimmy is a hyper jackass and I’ve known too many people like him. The friend you are always having to bail out of trouble until you finally break free and move on. But the author does give him an interesting personality buried within. If nothing else I admired the fierceness of how he felt about everything. That said I think the amount of time spent with him in this book is about the limit of tolerance. Christy is that cute, imperfect, introverted, and slighly manic girl many angst ridden Gen Xers young men craved. Till you hooked up with one. Then you found how exhausting they are. But here the author gives her a big heart and we are able to see it appear for moments. And I couldn’t deny this trainwreck of a couple was made for each other. Here they get a wonderful sweet story. In the real world these two are the codependent couples who are constantly breaking up, getting back together, cheating on each other, threatening suicide to manipulate, beating each other up, then willingly going to jail to show how much they love the other person, usually in between bouts of alcohol and drug abuse. Realistically, that is probably the true future for Jimmy and Christy, no matter how smart and hip they are here. Really they felt like extreme versions of the couple from Hawke’s previous novel, The Hottest State. I guess these are the types of characters Hawke finds interesting and inspiring.

Their parents are more interesting as characters. I loved this line by Jimmy’s father who loathed everything about the cookie-cutter neighborhood they lived in: “If the big bad wolf comes, open the door.” Jimmy’s Priest was also a fun character to see. But all these side characters unfortunately come and go quickly.

This is a road trip story which helps conceal the sometimes meandering nature of the plot, the characters at least are literally going somewhere even if the plot is barely doing anything. It is more a story of the things that happened to these people over the course of a week or so. There is maybe some growth and arc for the characters I guess. Its an ok story.

The setting is bleak, most of the story takes place in winter in the rust belt. There are a few pop culture references to events which occured in the recent past in backstory so the best I could come up with was the story was set in the late 90s. I hate this kind of vagueness as I end up focusing too much on trying to figure this out as I am reading and probably miss aspects of the story. It was published in 2002 but no mentions of 9/11 make me think the late 90s timeframe is correct.

Much of the dialogue read like a Richard Linkletter or Whit Stillman film, which I think Hawke loves and is well suited for. Lots of psuedo psychological and philosophical deep ramblings that in high quantities come off as pretentious. And here these scenes can be too long and too frequent, especially with Christy who seems the more intelligent and nuerotic of the couple. It was just excessive.

There are numerous errors so far as the Army references go. Really its probably fare to say most everything to do with the military in the novel is wrong. Jimmy is introduced as a Staff Sergeant, apparently after only two and a half years in the Army. No. Later he considers “resigning” from the Army. No, it doesn’t work like that. Everything mentioned about the dishonrable discharge stuff, from the ramifications to who has the authority to issue them is wrong, it felt like Hawke knew the terms and just used them willy nilly. This is annoying because silly errors like this take me out of the story, they ruin suspension of disbelief. And so many other writers do so much better, you don’t need 100% accuracy but this just terrible, its basic stuff. Just do a little research or ask someone, this book came from a major publishing house. But ignoring all that, I did appreciate the author showed the other side of the military with a character; the real junior enlisted jackassery that exists and is rarely depicted. Not that the Army is filled with Jimmys but there are plenty like him. And really Jimmy being in the military is not in of itself central to the story. It plays a role of course, when you are in the military you have literally given up your freedom, he has to deal with that, his AWOL status is a major issue he has to deal with, etc... But again, this is not a story about a soldier or the Army, its a story about a dude who happens to be a soldier. That is one thing that drew me to the book originally, I appreciate seeing servicemembers depicted as characters in books and film beyond a traditional military story where its the focus of the story.

All in all I probably did like this more upon rereading it all these years later but I don’t know that I would go so far as to call it good. More like ok. Not bad. 2/5, it probably gained a star from what I would have rated it twenty years ago.

A coupke on a road trip - encouraging deep thoughts

Partly from the perspective of James Heartstock and partly from the perspective of his young wife Christy, this novel is a volatile road trip with each lover wondering who they are and how they got there. Hawke writes with comfortable phrasing and has great lines sure to stir the thoughts of readers, even those who don't want to like this just because the boy can act.

"It's all right to cry son, it doesn't mean anything important; it's just natural." Again for a moment, he was quiet. "People think when they cry that something monumental is happening. But it isn't. Emotion doesn't mean much of anything."

3 stars! As you know, I have a soft spot for celebrity-written works...but this one is actually fiction, which piqued my interest even more! I've never read any of Ethan Hawke's work before, but I'm familiar with him (and his family) on the Hollywood scene. I don't know that I'd read "Ash Wednesday" again, because it was just a tad grittier than I usually like my books...but it was good enough as a one-and-done. A good majority of this story happens on the road, which is interesting. It's clear that Hawke has an eye and ear for characters, and the character of Jimmy Heartsock is at the forefront here. Really, this book touches on a variety of topics: army life, feeling directionless, love and relationships, cars, driving, road trips, marriage, religion, basketball...you almost get the feeling that Jimmy is struggling with his mental state, with the constant goings-on about random things. Oh, and we haven't even mentioned Jimmy's near obsession with marriage: specifically to Christy. It's a subject he debates pretty much on every page, over the course of 221 pages. It grated on my nerves a little by the end, and I really wanted him to:
1. Get his shit together
2. Take some anger management courses
3. Show up in an epilogue maybe a couple years on, so I could see for myself how the marriage to Christy turned out.

In the end, Jimmy does try for the first idea. Actually, in his defense, he appears sincere and very earnest. It's just those anger issues...feel borderline stalker-ish at times.

All in all, I liked the book, but I wouldn't call it a particularly uplifting read.

Mercoledì delle ceneri può essere riassunto così: Jimmy e Christy (o Christy e Jimmy) si amano, punto. Si potrebbe dire solo questo del romanzo di Ethan Hawke o forse si potrebbe aggiungere che oltre all’amore viene raccontata la scelta di un ragazzo e di una ragazza di sposarsi e diventare una famiglia. Perché non è che la famiglia “la si fa”, come spesso orribilmente si dice, ma la famiglia la si deve far diventare e diventare è un verbo Bello ma terribilmente spaventoso perché include un mutamento che non si può prevedere e chi lo può sapere se il dopo sarà altrettanto Bello come il presente che in quel momento successivo sarà ormai il passato.

https://justanotherpoint.wordpress.co...

n  

"I don't want somebody to stay with me just because he promised to do so eighteen years ago or whatever. He should stay with me because he wants to, because he loves me and believes that being with me is what he needs most deeply. An awake, conscious life, that's all I really desired."

n

I read The Hottest State about a year and a half ago, and instantly fell in love with Ethan Hawke's writing. He immediately throws you into whatever tangled web of love he's writing about, and you become attached to the characters instantly. Ash Wednesday is no different. It packs a punch from beginning to end, and you have no idea how things are going to end up. Minds change, roads and scenery change, and you are rooting for these two people to make it work and figure out themselves and their life together. I found a lot of myself in Christy's character, in how she does or does not handle her relationships, and in the person she wants to be for herself. I felt one way starting this book, about the state of their relationship and whether they should be together or not, but by the end I just wanted them to be able to make it, and to make each other happy. Because at the end of the day, isn't that what we all want?

I finished Ash Wednesday; I loved it. Ethan Hawke is deep. I was right, Christy was Uma. I loved her character. But he's not married to her anymore in real life, which was a premonition in his novel--that marriages might not last. His dialogue is really natural, masculine and cool when he writes in the first person as "Jimmy". He's thoughtful. There are lots of thoughts. Ethan is great at building "scenes' up to a crescendo (like the basketball scene with the young boy who dared to play Jimmy for money, egging him on, and criticizing Jimmy for his age, his car, his class, his career: Army, and all the things he's about). I've seen Ethan Hawke do that in his movies. That nervous energy he has that is engaging. That deep-felt love he likes to show. The deep conversations (like in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset with Julie Delpy). In Ash Wednesday, Ethan built a crescendo around the pathos that his father's mental illness created, even hinting that the apple doesn't fall far from the proverbial tree; Jimmy trying to help Christie in New Orleans, stuck in grid-locked Mardi Gras traffic, on the verge of losing their baby, going off on a bender that lands him in prison, at the time she needs him most. I'll try for masculine, deep and cool in my next novel. :) It really works! I highly recommend this novel. The only negative, I think, is that most 20 somethings don't worry as much as Christy does about marriage, they don't have that insight that seems to be coming from someone older, like the author, Ethan Hawke. Usually you go in blindly with tons of hope when you are young and in love. And maybe that's the point; Christy had been married before. Jimmy hadn't.

Wow. Terrible. Wow. I can't believe this got published.