A Bright Ray of Darkness

December 7, 2020
Hawke (Ash Wednesday) dramatizes the struggles of a Hollywood actor whose marriage has just ended because of his infidelity in this uneven roman à clef. Thirty-two-year-old William Harding is best known for having cheated on his wife, superstar singer Mary Marquis. As Harding adjusts to the end of their marriage and to sharing custody of their two young children, he simultaneously prepares to make his Broadway debut—he’s been cast as Hotspur in a new production of Henry IV (a role Hawke himself played in 2003). Harding struggles with mastering the role as part of a company including Virgil Smith, a legendary thespian regarded as Laurence Olivier’s heir, who’s playing Falstaff. Even as Harding tries to come to terms with Mary’s having moved on to another man, he holds out irrational hope that she’ll attend one of his performances. Harding’s relationship with his kids is underdeveloped, but Hawke’s behind-the-scenes look at staging a Shakespeare play provides the highlights, particularly his descriptions of the cartoonishly imposing Virgil (“Virgil was crawling to his position like a homeless madman, muttering to himself, with his dresser following, trying to give the fat man his belt and sword”). Hawke deserves credit for plumbing the dark depths of his doppelgänger.

December 1, 2020
A movie star who has suffered total tabloid humiliation plays Broadway for the first time. In a recent interview, Hawke explained that his fifth book is "everything I've learned about the theater in the past 35 years of work jammed together as if it all happened in one fictional production." It also seems to contain everything he's learned about living in the klieg-lit fishbowl of celebrity. At 32, William Harding has been a screen idol since he was a teenager; he begins rehearsal for his first Broadway role--Hotspur in Henry IV--on the heels of a meltdown in his personal life. His marriage to a beloved rock star has publicly imploded after the exposure of his brief affair with a woman in South Africa; he's living in a Manhattan hotel, seeing his children only in small doses, and experiencing venomous hatred from just about everyone he meets. The novel follows him from the first rehearsal to the closing of the show, in which he is directed by and plays alongside giants of the profession, giving him a complete education in the complexities of acting for the stage. "When a performance is going well there is no thought," he explains, "you are not amused at how well you might be "acting"--there is no you....The outside world tends to celebrate the most trivial superficial aspects of an actor's life, lifting their personality to a plastic God-like status, but the actual joy of acting lies in the absence of personality." Or as the director puts it, "There are only two kinds of Shakespeare productions: ones that change your life, and ones that suck shit." It's not just this "Irish Buddha" director character who is prone to long, profound speeches; poor William gets them everywhere he turns, from an alcoholic playwright in a bar, from an actor friend with a bag of cocaine in the back of a limo, even from his mother. A brilliant insider's account of the joys and terrors of acting, the trials of celebrity, and the secrets of Henry IV.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

December 15, 2020
Hollywood actor Hawke follows his fable-like novel, Rules for a Knight (2015), with this intriguing character study of faith, masculinity, and celebrity. With similarities to Hawke's own life story, film actor William Harding seemingly self-destructs by cheating on his beautiful wife, a rock icon. Kicked out of the family home, he now lives in the Mercury Hotel in New York. He drinks and smokes to distract himself from both his personal troubles and his anxiety about playing Hotspur in an ambitious Broadway production of Shakespeare's Henry IV. He is also consumed by worry about his two young children, his voice, and whether he can succeed on the stage as he has on the screen. William has a tragicomic lack of self-awareness. He is a 32-year-old with the mentality of Holden Caulfield and is not helped by the contradictory advice he receives from other self-obsessed actors in the production. While hampered by some clunky analogies, Hawke's novel is nonetheless an enthralling portrayal of a beleaguered actor's struggles to balance his life and the physical and mental toll of a Broadway production.

COPYRIGHT(2020) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.