Give credit to Ethan Hawke. He could have stayed a Hollywood pretty-boy heartthrob post–Dead Poets Society and Reality Bites. Instead, he resides in New York, where he’s founder and co-director of the avant-garde Malaparte Theatre, and he’s a valuable regular in the indie films of Austin’s Richard Linklater, from Before Sunrise and The Newton Boys through Tape and Waking Life.

Lately, Hawke has become a novelist. His second book, Ash Wednesday (Knopf, $22.95), is the work of a real writer, a talent, with its Albany-to-Houston road story of the romance and matrimony of two bruised, self-hating young people. Jimmy is an Army sergeant who joined the military because "that movie Top Gun put me over the edge. Tom Cruise on that Ninja banging that girl. Fuckin’ A." Christy is a whirlpool of spiritual questions in her head but a dissatisfied nurse in life, and the survivor of an idiotic teen marriage. Although distrustful of everyone, they come together through boiling sex, and their commingling slowly takes them an awkward, disbelieving step toward grace. And then a step back, as amour gives way to intense lovers’ quarrels, highway estrangement, and a possible miscarriage on the heels of Mardi Gras: Ash Wednesday. (It’s then, at the stroke of midnight, that hardened cops take back the New Orleans streets.)

Come on, Jimmy and Christy! Readers will root for Hawke’s newlyweds to get it into their coconut skulls: they’re nothing without each other in this mean, squalid world. In real life? Hawke continues on with Uma Thurman. As the book jacket bio says, "He lives in New York with his wife and two children."

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER EVER. I’ve just gotten to James Robert Parish’s Gus Van Sant (Thunder Mouth Press, $24.95), a February 2002 publication and one that doesn’t sound very promising: an unauthorized biography by a writer of previous spill-alls about Whoopi Goldberg and Rosie O’Donnell. But this life and times of the Oregon-based filmmaker (Drugstore Cowboy, Good Will Hunting) is extremely well researched, and so readable that I polished off its 300-plus pages in one fun evening. I’ve talked twice to Van Sant, once arriving unannounced at his Portland home, and what I observed is what, as Parish describes, everyone gets: a shy, reserved, nice guy, a WASPy gay man from a skiing and golfing family, someone terminally private about his deeper thoughts, including his sexuality. "I’m less a gay activist than a gay pacifist," he has observed, with typical wry humor. Everybody who has worked on his movies seems to like him and to enjoy his quiet, almost passive presence on the set.

Parish astutely discerns a Warholian sensibility: the melting-into-the-wall voyeur surrounded by pretty young men, including drug-soaked street trade. Did Van Sant stand by while River Phoenix, whom he adored, got hooked on heroin during the My Private Idaho shoot? That’s practically the only criticism of the director in the book. An "auteur"? Ben Affleck gives this as Van Sant’s central theme: "young guys trying to find an alternative life for themselves." Why did he remake sacred Psycho? Parish notes that, after spending months trying to convince Miramax that he was the right person to direct Good Will Hunting, Van Sant was surprised that Universal gave an instant "yes" to his bizarre idea, only half-serious, to redo Hitchcock. What might have helped convince him: the million-dollar salary, twice his Good Will Hunting paycheck.

A FAMILY BIBLE is okay, but I’ve spent far more time in my life burrowing through the yearly paperback update of Leonard Maltin’s Movie & Video Guide, which provides succinct, amazingly accurate descriptions and evaluations of films new and old that are playing on TV or are available on cassette and DVD. In lieu of a new auto, I change my Maltin each winter, trading in last year’s manhandled version for the sleek-and-shiny new one.

Until now! Hold your ponies! Leonard Maltin’s 2002 Movie & Video Guide (Signet, $8.99) brags on the cover that it has "More than 19,000 entries." But Maltin’s 2001 Guide, seemingly antiquated, has "More than 20,000 entries." Do the math: 1000 movie descriptions, probably of classics, have been dropped in 2002! Stay with the old!

RIP: Lou Lombardo, at age 70, a legendary film editor who’d been in a coma since 1991. In his prime he leaped between the cutting rooms of Sam Peckinpah and Robert Altman, and he was responsible for, among other gems, Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller and The Long Goodbye.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com