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A review of Ash Wednesday

by Ethan Hawke

Confused newlyweds embark on a road trip-- and find themselves.

Reviewed by: Jennifer Santiago
About Jennifer Santiago

Ash Wednesday Ugh. As dreadfully embarrassing as it is to admit, I really liked Ethan Hawke's novel, Ash Wednesday. In his debut novel, The Hottest State (1996), the pretentious pretty-boy actor showed some promise with an engaging, highly readable tale of Gen-X angst. In Ash Wednesday, however, Hawke has clearly matured as a writer and his work has gone from "good, for an actor" to simply "good."

Ash Wednesday's protagonist, Jimmy Heartsock, is a coked-up Army sergeant wrestling with the demons of his father's mental illness and subsequent suicide. Jimmy narrates the tale in a voice that sounds strikingly like a 20-something, modern-day Holden Caulfield. "I'll stare into anything that reflects. That's not a flattering quality, and I wish I didn't do it, but I do. I'm vain as all hell. It's revolting," Jimmy reports. "Most of the time when I'm looking in the mirror, I'm checking to see if I'm still here or else I'm wishing I was somebody else, a Mexican bandito or somebody like that. I have a mustache. Most guys with mustaches look like fags, but I don't. I touch mine too much, though. I touch it all the time. I don't even know why I'm telling you about it now. I just stare at myself constantly and I wish I didn't. It brings me absolutely no pleasure at all."

When we first meet Jimmy, he has just broken up with his girlfriend, Christy, and is desperately wishing he hadn't. The narration of each chapter alternates between Jimmy and Christy, and it must be said that Hawke captures the essence of his self-doubting female heroine just as effectively as he writes males characters.

Christy is pregnant with Jimmy's baby, a fact of which he is ignorant. She flees their hometown of Albany, NY to seek out her grandmother in Texas, but Jimmy follows the bus, apprehends Christy at a rest stop in Kingston, and so their cross-country journey of self-discovery begins.

The couple travels to Ohio at Christy's urging, so Jimmy can gain closure on his father's death, and so they can be married in Jimmy's boyhood hometown. They then honeymoon in New Orleans during the height of Mardi Gras-- a huge mistake, because when Christy begins bleeding, all the hospitals are overpopulated with drunken revelers sporting stab wounds and bloody noses. They must make their way out of town through the Mardi Gras parade and speed towards Houston to get Christy to a hospital. But their trip, fraught with anxiety though it may be, cannot be uneventful. They are pulled over by police officers in Texas, and Jimmy is arrested for being AWOL from the Army. He sits in a holding cell, powerless to help his brand-new wife and to discover the fate of her pregnancy.

Hawke's main writing strength is dialog, and he develops his characters thoroughly and believably. Readers will find themselves very invested in Jimmy and Christy's fate. Ash Wednesday is an excellent novel, and I must concede, however begrudgingly, that Ethan Hawke can write.

Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: Ash Wednesday

Copyright © by Jennifer Santiago, 2002

Reviewed by Jennifer Santiago:
-- The Lovely Bones - by Alice Sebold
-- 30 Minute Meals - by Rachael Ray
-- Raising Blaze - by Debra Ginsberg
-- Backpack - by Emily Barr
-- You Are Not a Stranger Here - by Adam Haslett
-- Bookends - by Jane Green
-- A Confederacy of Dunces - by John Kennedy Toole
-- Ash Wednesday - by Ethan Hawke
-- All Saints' Day - by Brent Benoit
-- The Stepford Wives - by Ira Levin
-- The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating - by David M. Buss
-- Literary New Orleans - by Judy Long (Editor)
-- The Sopranos Family Cookbook - by Allen Rucker; Recipes by Michele Scicolone
-- Atonement - by Ian McEwan
-- The Crimson Petal and the White - by Michel Faber
-- Midnight Bayou - by Nora Roberts
-- The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants - by Ann Brashares
-- The Zygote Chronicles - by Suzanne Finnamore
-- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - by J.K. Rowling









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