Bibliofemme Bookclub An Irish Bookclub

Having read and enjoyed Ethan Hawke’s debut novel, The Hottest State, it was, of course, my interest in his published oeuvre that drew me to the reading of his new book, Ash Wednesday, at the Project in Dublin a couple of years ago. Well, that and the power of celebrity. It’s not often that you get an international actor at your questioning mercy and the venue was packed with people who wanted to talk about more than just his books.

Ash Wednesday is the story of a hapless couple – she’s pregnant, he’s AWOL from the US Army – on a road trip to Texas. It is told in the first-person voices of Jimmy and Christy, a young couple who are struggling with the harsh realities of marriage and impending parenthood.

The reader’s experience with the book is much like Jimmy and Christy’s love-hate relationship. Sometimes you feel like you don’t want to go through with reading this book but, somehow, you keep with it. Neither character – and this is, in the main, a two-hander – are particularly sympathetic or likeable and it is to Hawke’s credit that he manages to reel the reader along the road towards Texas in Jimmy’s souped-up Chevy Nova.

One of the problems with novels written by celebrities is that our knowledge of their lives will always inform our reading of their books. It’s not hard to see Jimmy’s description of Christy’s gargantuan feet having parallels in Hawke’s real-life former marriage with Uma Thurman – a woman whose large feet were fetishised by Quentin Tarantino in Kill Bill.

A book that remains with you after you have finished it, Ash Wednesday shows a lot of progress from Hawke’s first novel. If he can move away from the autobiographical elements and work on pure imagination, there’s a writer inside that actor trying to get out. One to watch in the future.