Gordon Weaver writes fiction mostly about middle- and lower-middle-class, middle-aged, mid-western men: football coaches, professors, lawyers, television producers, insurance salesmen, alcoholics, bar owners, soldiers, fathers, sons, and brothers. At the core of his fiction is a fascination with the mystery of time, and what he seems to find within that mystery is the key to identity. Weaver approaches the process of time via the moment, the point of temporal intersection of past, present, and future. In his own words (in a 1984 interview with Thomas E, Kennedy), Weaver's technique is "to settle on a given moment in a character's life, to stop that moment in time, examine it, see its implications," to examine "how experience means to people" rather than "how it can be described from without, `objectively.'" His fiction is a gallery of such moments, a frieze of characters consuming and being consumed by the moment. Weaver...