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A review by willjacks
A Bright Ray of Darkness by Ethan Hawke
5.0
I can't believe it, but I read this book in a day.
What got me hooked was just how much I thought of the protagonist as a complete #@*&. Yes he was going through an all-encompassing barrage of hate from strangers, but fact is, he cheated on his wife and never truly apologised. The first quarter of the book had me thinking the story itself would be sleazy and awful. You can imagine how much of a contrast this sounds to a typical 5 star review.
The tricky part about writing a review of this book, is that I don't want to simplify the characters, because they're all so complex for a novel with <250 pages. By about halfway through, you don't dislike William as a person. Instead, you begin to view him as a human being rather than a famous actor with 'the perfect life' who pissed his marriage away. You don't have to forgive his actions by the end, you just feel as though he's a naive kid stuck in a cycle of forever emulating the past actions of his egregious mother and absent father.
This man was a movie star married to a world-famous musician with a beautiful house and two kids. This is what many people dream their life could be. Fact is though, he hated it. Someone in the book mentions how the foundations of his marriage were crooked to begin with. When you literally live your dream life, but you realise how unhappy you are and begin to resent it, what do you do?
As a novel in which the characters are performing Shakespeare, the dialogue thusly became lengthy monologues. Ezekiel, The King, his mother, his father; they all have these interesting moments where they give William advice or talk about their experiences and they become Shakespearean monologues in their own right.
Making a largely despicable character in William utterly relatable made me think about my own guilt, my own naiveties. I was genuinely nervous for William before the first performance of Henry IV.
There's just so much to unravel with this book. I really wish that novels with double the length of this one had half of this book's depth. The fact that this author is a film actor who has performed multiple times in stage plays brings a level of authenticity that no typical author could ever replicate. I would never assume that Ethan (the author) sees himself as being William, but I can guess that many readers would since the parallels between him and his character are there. Maybe he does...
All in all, this was a lightning in a bottle moment.
Do we really have to like the protagonists of every book we read? How come TV shows can seamlessly pull off the hate-able hero trope (Sopranos, Breaking Bad) but novels get mixed receptions?
What got me hooked was just how much I thought of the protagonist as a complete #@*&. Yes he was going through an all-encompassing barrage of hate from strangers, but fact is, he cheated on his wife and never truly apologised. The first quarter of the book had me thinking the story itself would be sleazy and awful. You can imagine how much of a contrast this sounds to a typical 5 star review.
The tricky part about writing a review of this book, is that I don't want to simplify the characters, because they're all so complex for a novel with <250 pages. By about halfway through, you don't dislike William as a person. Instead, you begin to view him as a human being rather than a famous actor with 'the perfect life' who pissed his marriage away. You don't have to forgive his actions by the end, you just feel as though he's a naive kid stuck in a cycle of forever emulating the past actions of his egregious mother and absent father.
This man was a movie star married to a world-famous musician with a beautiful house and two kids. This is what many people dream their life could be. Fact is though, he hated it. Someone in the book mentions how the foundations of his marriage were crooked to begin with. When you literally live your dream life, but you realise how unhappy you are and begin to resent it, what do you do?
As a novel in which the characters are performing Shakespeare, the dialogue thusly became lengthy monologues. Ezekiel, The King, his mother, his father; they all have these interesting moments where they give William advice or talk about their experiences and they become Shakespearean monologues in their own right.
Making a largely despicable character in William utterly relatable made me think about my own guilt, my own naiveties. I was genuinely nervous for William before the first performance of Henry IV.
There's just so much to unravel with this book. I really wish that novels with double the length of this one had half of this book's depth. The fact that this author is a film actor who has performed multiple times in stage plays brings a level of authenticity that no typical author could ever replicate. I would never assume that Ethan (the author) sees himself as being William, but I can guess that many readers would since the parallels between him and his character are there. Maybe he does...
All in all, this was a lightning in a bottle moment.
Do we really have to like the protagonists of every book we read? How come TV shows can seamlessly pull off the hate-able hero trope (Sopranos, Breaking Bad) but novels get mixed receptions?