[close] The fictional territory of this disquieting first collection is a state of emergency, and for Weihe the emergency is always the same: It is the terrifying possibility that one will be caught, in any instant, without a fully realized life, a life of passion and love, above all. In "Girl in the Coat," a professor is seduced by a desperate young woman into a decision too sudden and mysterious to defend. The husband of "Love Spots" drives his provocatively dressed wife around Seattle on a nostalgic and finally nightmarish search for a place to make love in a car now too small and divided. In "Off Season," a young man, whose wild and loving mother deserts him for a stranger, clings incestuously to his sister until yet another stranger appears. In "All Clear," a divorced father, locked to his young son for a few interminable hours, waits out his ex-wife's passionate "emergency" with her new lover. In the novella, "Another Life," an American writer, who has "no ear for any language but his own," returns to Paris for an international conference on Ernest Hemingway. In a subtle interweaving and counterpointing of his own life with Hemingway's in the Twenties, he re-searches, in memory, a life fully lived, in the body, in art, and in the "moveable feast" of loss. [close]