The Weight of Dreams [Hardcover]

Jonis Agee (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 1999

Jonis Agee's acclaimed fiction has established her as a visceral, lyrical interpreter of the interplay between family legends and reality, the land and its inhabitants, the forces of nature and those of the human heart. Her landscapes are primitive, her characters intense and magnetic, her themes mythic even as she "celebrates the gritty, scarred layers of the daily world with specificity and wisdom" (Chicago Tribune)

Against the stunning backdrop of a vanishing West, The Weight of Dreams intertwines the passion and sweep of Larry McMurtry with a narrative of love and family as compelling as those of Rosellen Brown or Jane Hamilton. At seventeen, Ty Bonte's only escape from a harsh mother and violent father is his ranch work beneath the seasons of the Nebraska sandhills sky. But soon he must flee that too, when a bout of vandalism with his drinking buddy, Harney Rivers, ends in the brutal beating of a young Indian. Not until twenty years later, when Harney's reappearance shadows his life as a Kansas horse trader and his budding love for Dakota Carlyle, does Ty return to Nebraska to face the past. His quest for retribution, resolution, and redemption climaxes in a courtroom battle as furious and mesmerizing as his youthful wrangling on the range.
A novel of greed, power, and violence--from a "gifted poet of that dark lushness in the heart of the American landscape"--The New York Times Book Review

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In her earlier novel South of Resurrection, Jonis Agee seemed bent on refuting Thomas Wolfe: you can go home again, though sometimes it's easier not to. The Weight of Dreams finds her returning to the same thematic territory in a sweeping, ambitious novel about nothing less than good and evil, writ on a vast Western scale. Home, for Ty Bonte, is the hardscrabble Nebraska Sandhills, where he's been doing "a man's work" on the family ranch since the age of 8. Unfortunately, he's also been taking a man's share of punishment--his mother's abandonment, his father's abuse, even his own guilt over his baby brother's accidental death. Small wonder, then, that Ty turns into something of a delinquent, especially when he joins forces with Harney Rivers. Rich kid, sadist, drug dealer--"the boy who could put his hands on anything illegal"--Harney gets Ty into even more trouble than he could on his own. When they pick up a pair of Indian hitchhikers one bitterly cold winter night, the violence that subsequently erupts will change all four of their lives forever.

Twenty years later, Ty is living in Kansas, where he owns a small, hard-won farm and trades horses for a living. He's made a sober, reasonably successful life for himself, but is still haunted by the repercussions of his past--which include an outstanding warrant for his arrest. Then one day Ty picks up a mysterious woman named Dakota along with a load of horses, and the past comes knocking on his door in the form of Harney Rivers. Before the novel is through, Ty will have to make amends for the crimes of his youth--and in the process, redefine what it means to go home. Gritty depictions of ranch life; lyrical evocations of the stark Nebraska landscape; a romance that feels both passionate and true: there is much to admire here, even when the entire package feels somewhat overlong. For one thing, Agee evokes the horse life so vividly that you can practically smell it--and among her characters, only the impossibly evil Harney comes off as less than true-to-life. In the end, flaws like these count for little when weighed against Agee's vivid portrait of place. --Chloe Byrne

From Publishers Weekly

Though Agee's fourth novel is oddly book-ended between two courtroom scenes, its strength is in what lies betweenA its depiction of the landscape of the Nebraska Sand Hills country, the unforgiving weather, the gritty demands of ranching andthe relationships forged between people and the animals they care for. In 1975, teenage Ty Bonte's family has been ravaged by the accidental death of his little brother. Ty is brutalized by his drunken father and unloved by his pious mother. Moreover, he keeps bad company; his villainous chum, Harney Rivers, is a small town rich boy whose cruel exploits continually go unpunished. One night, Ty and Harney beat two drunken Indian men and leave them for dead; the men survive only because Ty goes back to save them, before fleeing the state. This event is reconstructed in flashback; most of the book takes place 22 years later, when Ty is a horse trader, living modestly in Kansas. Harney, now a prosperous banker in their old Nebraska town, reenters his old buddy's life, killing Ty's beloved horse and stealing the rest of his stable, savagely beating Ty, and threatening Dakota, the woman with whom Ty has established a promising though uncertain relationship. Ty and Dakota return to Ty's family ranch, where his father is dying of emphysema and his mother is still priggish and cold. The families of the brutalized Indians seek justice, if not revenge, and Ty stands to lose everything: his woman, his ranch, his freedom. This tale of a sympathetic but busted-up man is compelling, but here the narrative suddenly diffuses, weighted down with too many characters who engage in endless machinations either to save Ty or to hurt him. Agee (Strange Angels) is best in engaging the drama of the rugged countryside. In tying up the plot, her direction scatters and each ambitious subplot grows broad and thin, diminishing the central struggle. Agent, Emma Sweeney. Author tour. (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; 1ST edition (July 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067088233X
• ISBN-13: 978-0670882335
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,353,691 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and grew up in Nebraska and Missouri, places where many of my stories and novels are set. In all, I'm the author of thirteen books, including five novels, five collections of short fiction, and two books of poetry.

My most recent novel is The River Wife (Random House, 2007), which is about five generations of women who experience love, heartbreak, passion, and deceit against the backdrop of the nineteenth-century South. I'm the Adele Hall Professor of English at The University of Nebraska -- Lincoln, where I teach creative writing and twentieth-century fiction.

I'm married to the writer Brent Spencer. Together we are the indentured servants to two bichons frises and one horse. We live in Ponca Hills, which is on the Missouri River, north of Omaha.

I own twenty pairs of cowboy boots (some of them works of art), love the open road, and believe that ecstasy and hard work are the basic ingredients of life and writing.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Weight of Dreams...., August 17, 2000

By 

Carol Frisbie (Arlington, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Weight of Dreams (Hardcover)

It's been a while since I've read a book that I literally couldn't put down until it was finished. Agee writes characters--both human and animal--with depth, realism and emotion. The reader becomes a part of their world, like a spirit floating above them and within them, seeing all, feeling all. Reading this book, you *experience* what the Nebraska wind feels like, the taste of dust, the wet-earth smell of a horse ridden hard...and emotions so poignant and real that you feel your own vulnerabilities are laid open and exposed.

I read many books. I clean my shelves of most of the novels, as I know I'll never be inspired to read them again. This novel is a keeper, and I'll certainly return to Ty and Dakota's world. I learned a great deal from reading Agee's story, about places I've never been and people who are kindred souls inside though they be strangers on the outside. This book is fiction, but it speaks truth that you can feel in your bones.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sandhills noir. . ., July 5, 2004

By 

Ronald Scheer "rockysquirrel" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Weight of Dreams (Mass Market Paperback)

This book had me staying up more than a couple nights way past my bedtime, unable to put it down. It's really several books wrapped into one. On different levels it is a crime fiction story leading to a courtroom drama, a bitter family melodrama, an unsettling look into the shady side of horse shows, a detailed account of cattle ranching through a storm-driven winter, a tale of guilt and personal salvation, a passionate and sensual love story, a travelogue portraying the stark beauty of the Nebraska Sandhills, an examination of race relations (white and Native American), and a story of hanging onto a family ranch on the edge of bankruptcy.

The author sustains all these threads by interconnecting them with considerable suspense and tension. It's like film noir - dark, brooding, always on the verge of violence or mischance. And under that interplay of tensions is a moral vision that seems often at the point of being lost completely.

Agee populates her novel with a large cast of characters, using shifting points of view to explore their unfolding relationships and internal lives. With the focus of a short-story writer, she introduces and opens up incidents that seem to bring the narrative almost to a stop, while we wait to learn how these scenes take their place in the larger picture embracing all of them. While some readers may find the pace of the novel somewhat slow because of this, I was fascinated by the richness of detail and would have been happy for even more, especially exploring the resolution of the central conflict of the narrative - between its protagonist, Ty Bonte, and his nemesis, Harney Rivers.

I'm happy to recommend this book. Like other reviewers familiar with the terrain and seasons of the Nebraska Sandhills, I was pleased to see this rolling region of the Great Plains and its people represented so faithfully and in an engaging story told by a gifted writer.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I've been there, I know, and the book captures it!, May 18, 2002

By 

Clay Brown (Selah, WA USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Weight of Dreams (Mass Market Paperback)

I was born in NE, lived there, then in other remote ranching areas. The people, times, and conditions that are masterfully described in this book are what it is all about. I doubt that those who have lived their lives in cities, on lots, among throngs of people, and within the mainstream of the American culture, can fully realize the truth and character of this story and work. I probably see these people and events through a different window than the author, but she has captured their essence. Read it and live the special life of those who look across rolling hills of nothingness and see everything!