In actor and writer Ethan Hawke's thoughtful and atmospheric A Bright Ray of Darkness, a man struggles to come to terms with his crumbling marriage, fatherhood and his own desires. William Harding, Hawke's 21-year-old protagonist from his debut novel, The Hottest State (1996), returns as a 32-year-old actor about to make his Broadway debut as Hotspur in Henry IV. Meanwhile, his marriage is undergoing a public implosion as his wife leaves him in the wake of his infidelity. While William grapples with his persistent (and fruitless) hope that his wife will return to him, he satisfies his impulses for sex and female comfort with one-night stands and half-realized affairs. Meanwhile, Henry IV and William's eccentric fellow actors become his center of gravity as he seeks solace through the transportive power of acting.
From the start, Hawke's narrative voice creates a compelling atmosphere of disaffected self-assuredness that barely conceals his protagonist's actual but submerged despair. William's first-person voice keeps the story of his life seeming simple and obvious, even when he tumbles into self-loathing and hopeless fantasies. The book becomes a reflection of William's "blissful state of melancholy" while allowing the reader to see beyond William's self-delusions. Nevertheless, it is Hawke's descriptions of being an embodied actor transcending himself that truly shine. In William's scenes onstage, readers can forget the plot's tribulations and glimpse how acting, like reading, can allow one to slip into the bodies, voices and feelings of others. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor