The Weight Of Nothing

By Steven Gillis

MEMORY. REGRET. REVENGE. FORGIVENESS. Steven Gillis’ second novel, THE WEIGHT OF NOTHING, explores these issues through the eyes of Bailey Finne, a gifted pianist who has nonetheless forsaken his... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0972429557
• ISBN13: 9780972429559
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: Brook st Pr
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.17 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.8" x 1.0" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

The Weight of Nothing

The Weight of Nothing is a huge novel. While you could read it in a leisurely fashion, enjoying the characters and the plot at a superficial level, there is a wealth of appreciation for art, music and philosophy. After a few pages I picked up a pen and started highlighting passages I liked and wanted to mull over later. The two central characters are connected by an act of violence when the office building that Niles father works in is blown up by Bailey's brother in a terrorist bombing. Niles not only loses his tycoon father, but also the love of his life who was on her way to confront his father. A strange sympathy develops between Niles and Bailey. Bailey tries to save Niles from the somnambulant masochism that Niles tells Bailey he's developed, and Niles tries to keep Bailey from losing Elizabeth, a pianist who has lost her arm. I love Elizabeth--she is the first real challenge to Bailey's self-protective philosophies. "You're all gusto and wild performance," she tells him after hearing him play piano. Her bluntness is offset by how deeply she cares for Bailey, evidenced not only by many of the things she says but also by her willingness to put up with Bailey's emotional stagnation. Bailey's determination to "want for nothing" eventually sends Elizabeth away though. While in general Gillis complicates issues very satisfyingly, it is clear that the philosophies and attitudes Bailey has cultivated to protect himself are the very things that will hurt him the most in the end, if he cannot overcome them. Bailey and Niles are both deeply wounded characters, who cannot stop wounding themselves. They creatively, endlessly, try to work through their problems. Both have lost their girlfriends, and both have overbearing fathers (who Gillis manages to paint huge in only a few brushstrokes). In the end, they travel to Algiers for what proves to be a life-altering--and for one of them, life-ending--journey. I found myself not only enjoying TWON for its plot and characters, but also for the philosophical questions which were explored throughout the book. The author developed certain themes and questions over the course of the novel which I poured over after reading it. Besides those themes in bold on the inside cover (Memory Regret Revenge Forgiveness) there were several passages about time that I loved--some related to memory, "There's no order to memory after all, is there? I mean, once something happens, it's there in your head with all the rest," and others about the weight of time and its effects. In the end an unusual therapy is used on Bailey to undo this weight, and after this Bailey reestablishes contact with Elizabeth. As with all of the rest of the book, this attempt to reach out to Elizabeth is strange, compelling and beautiful.

A poignant and memorable chronicle of the long, difficult journey of the human spirit

Written by Book of the Year award finalist Steven Gills, The Weight of Nothing is a novel about money, regret, revenge, and forgiveness. Two friends, each carrying a burden that has haunted him for years, resolve to travel to Algiers and confront their demons. When terrible tragedy strikes, it poses a difficult question - how resolve years of squandered ambition, lost chances of love, and continue living past unspeakable violence? A poignant and memorable chronicle of the long, difficult journey of the human spirit.

Don't miss this novel!

Steven Gillis' novel, The Weight of Nothing, explores complex and deeply personal and painful issues, and he does that through wounded characters struggling to find answers to those issues. However, the answers they are searching for may not exist. Bailey Finne is a talented musician who doesn't fully develop or use his talent. What he does is become a professional student of Art History and makes excuses to the PhD. Committee about why his dissertation hasn't been completed. His problems revolve around the death of his mother, and his father's inability to move on after her death, as well as a troubled love life. Niles Kelly was born to a wealthy man via a surrogate mother that he had no contact with following his birth. Niles rejects his wealth but is haunted by the violent deaths of his father and his lover. Bailey and Niles travel together to Algiers to confront the ghosts of their past, hoping that the journey will help them excise those ghosts. The Weight of Nothing is well-written and a deeply moving piece. Gillis' prose is compelling as he weaves the characters through the labyrinth of life.

A Meticulously Crafted, Inordinately Consuming Novel

"There's a point in every piece of music when the melody completes itself and what's left is a final refrain. Occasionally an aria will vary its rhythm just enough to reinterpret the music through a less predictable finish, and other times an arrangement ends so suddenly the audience isn't quite sure the music's over until the last echoing notes have faded and the room falls eerily still. Either way, the song is done." Steven Gillis quietly set the literary cognoscenti on alert with the publication of his first novel WALTER FALLS last year. As always the question arises when a `first novel' suggests a talent of depth: Is there more? With the writing of THE WEIGHT OF NOTHING Gillis proves that his prelude, no matter how accomplished that was, served as only as intimation of the talent of this new American writer of substance. Gillis is that rare breed of writer who understands how to grasp the reader's attention, secure a train of thought in content and technique, assuring that once the written journey has begun, the only choice is to hold on with mind and emotion to the anticipated conclusion. THE WEIGHT OF NOTHING intertwines the lives of several young people in quest of the answer to the universal question of `Who Am I?' in a way that avoids the predictable and in essence incorporates their ephemeral acts with paired explorations in philosophy, art, music, religion, and global socioeconomic problems. In short, this is a story of two men whose early lives were set in motion by traumatic confrontations with loss and the aimlessness that accompanies that unleashed spectre. Bailey Finne is a gifted natural musician, Secretly learning piano from his musical mother until she is lost to him in childhood in a freak death that pushed his alcoholic father further away from his two sons (Bailey's older brother Tyler responds to this death by fleeing into a life crime, the military, and eventually terrorism). Descrying his father's flaccid, empty life, Bailey embraces music, being able to play all manner of music by ear but settling for entertaining folks in a bar rather than pursuing a career in classical music. He eventually becomes an art history major in college and blithely approaches his dissertation on an obtuse recluse of an artist (L.C. Timbal) with the same glib attitude that has become his life signature. He has girlfriends who try to encourage his gifts, but none more significantly than Elizabeth, a music major/pianist/composer who lost her right arm in a vicious dog attack. Bailey's obsession with her after she leaves him because of this immature, slothful attitude towards things she considers important propels Bailey on his journey to discover what is meaningful in life. "It's the conflict between what ends and our need to continue that causes trauma." Niles Kelley is the only son of a megalomaniac capitalist who unsuccessfully attempts to mold Niles into a template of his design, seeing no value at all in Niles' preoccupatio