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Adult Books - Fiction - General Fiction
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Ash Wednesday.
Hawke, Ethan (author).
July 2002. 256p. Knopf, hardcover, $22.95 (0-375-41326-X).
REVIEW.
First published May 15, 2002 (Booklist).
This is the second novel (following Hottest State, 1996) by Hawke, the young actor who recently starred in Training Day. A quasi road novel, it features hotheaded, impulsive Staff Sergeant Jimmy Heartsock, who has gone AWOL from the army in order to chase down and propose to his pregnant girlfriend, Christy, with whom he had broken up some 15 hours earlier. Christy has hopped a bus heading for her home state of Texas; Jimmy catches up with her and agrees to take her home if she will marry him. As the two drive cross country in Jimmy’s ‘69 Chevy Nova, they engage in an extended dialogue dissecting the genesis and evolution of their relationship and the struggle to accept the responsibilities of marriage and parenthood. Unfortunately, the novel consists almost entirely of dialogue and extended interior monologues that eventually blur into one voice. Thus we get opinions on everything from John Starks’ basketball playing (“He was an artist. He played with feeling, like Mozart”) to loneliness (“I was very concerned about loneliness when I was a little girl”). After a while, it begins to feel like one of those rambling, all-night conversations you had in college fueled by too much coffee, too many cigarettes, and a lot of bad fluorescent lighting. Hawke seems to be aiming for the eccentric, low-life ambience of a Barry Gifford novel, but this is definitely the lite version. Hats off to Hawke for putting himself out there, but it’s his celebrity, not his prose, that will sell this one. — Joanne Wilkinson
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