The Hottest State: A Novel

by Ethan Hawke

Overview

When William meets Sarah at a bar appropriately called the Bitter End, he is a few months short of his twenty-first birthday and about to act in his first movie. He is so used to getting what he wants that he has never been able to care too deeply for anyone. But all of that is about to change. And it is Sarah--bold and shy, seductive and skittish--who will become William's undoing and his salvation.

William's affair with Sarah will take him from a tenement on the Lower East Side to a hotel room in Paris, from a flip proposal of marriage to the extremities of outraged need and the wisdom that comes only to true survivors. Anyone who reads The Hottest State will encounter a writer who can charm, dazzle, and break the heart in a single paragraph.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316540834
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	10/01/1996
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

An Academy Award nominated actor for his work in TRAINING DAY, an Academy Award nominated writer for the BEFORE SUNSET screenplay and a Tony Award nominated actor for his work on stage in THE COAST OF UTOPIA, Ethan Hawke has uniquely established a successful career acting on film and on stage, as a novelist, a screenwriter and a director.

In film, Hawke was last seen in Richard Linklater’s FAST FOOD NATION. Some of his other film credits include EXPLORERS (which marked his acting debut), DEAD POETS SOCIETY, DAD, WHITE FANG, ALIVE, REALITY BITES, BEFORE SUNSET and the sequel BEFORE SUNRISE, GATTACA, GREAT EXPECTATIONS, HAMLET, and TRAINING DAY.

Ethan Hawke’s novels THE HOTTEST STATE and ASH WEDNESDAY are both available from Vintage. Hawke recently directed the film version of THE HOTTEST STATE. He will also make his Off Broadway directing debut in the fall of 2007 with Jonathan Marc Sherman’s dark comedy play, THINGS WE WANT.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

November 6, 1970

Place of Birth:

Austin, Texas

Education:

Attended Carnegie-Mellon University and New York University; no degree

Editorial Reviews

The actor's first novel of young love in Manhattan. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Sure he can act, but can he write? In his much-touted debut novel, Hawke evidently takes the time-honored advice to write about what one knows and weaves a tale of young love.

Library Journal

A first novel by the young actor featured in the Dead Poet's Society has a lot in common with the world of his film Reality Bites: It's a young man's idea of hip romance, with plenty of gestures to satisfy teeny-bopper fans.

Hawke's mercifully brief story is really an extended hissy fit over being dumped by the type of girl his narrator doesn't usually date—she's a bit plump, rather graceless, not beautiful by conventional standards. She is, of course, smart, which is important to 21-year-old William Harding, a working actor in New York City who admits he's got by on his good looks and charm. Certainly not his intellect—he's impressed by his ability to recite a long poem by Gregory Corso by heart in response to Sarah's reading to him from Adrienne Rich. His own mother warns him about the limits of life as "a handsome bullshitter," but William blunders along, full of his own importance as he lovingly records his every little foible and endearing personality trait, which seem to include smashing furniture when he's frustrated. Sarah, meanwhile, withholds sex, and hands him a tract on "Rape and the Twentieth-Century Woman." Pouting William must use a condom when the big moment finally comes. A Parisian interlude, where he alludes with false modesty to his career, contributes to their breakup—she realizes that she needs space, and William is sent packing, back to his beautiful, empty-headed girlfriend from the past—but not before reciting Shakespeare to Sarah from the street outside her apartment.

This clumsily written novel takes itself very seriously, although it is mostly content to name but not to show: We have to take Hawke's vague descriptions of "brilliant" friends, "great" books, "stupid" hair on faith, and then there's that "French" moustache on a waiter in . . . France. Skip the movie, if there is one.

Kirkus Reviews