Reviewed by Anthony Michael Morena

If the template for literary fiction as a genre relies on middle-class characters experiencing life events that result in psychological shifts, the essays in a book like Permanent Exhibit instead give readers straight up psyche. Two images from the book seem like good stand-ins for this literary mode. One is the cartoon Matthew Vollmer remembers watching as a kid of a turtle who retreats into his shell which is, in fact, an entire bachelor pad where the turtle, de-shelled, unwinds. The other is the scene where Vollmer visits his childhood home. The new owner had died unexpectedly, and the house, once so familiar, had been extensively remodeled according to the late owner's New Age design principles. In one room Vollmer finds a huge gong, the sound of which is meant to increase positive energy, which he rings (gongs?). It's a sound that resonates throughout this book.

What I recognize in that sound is someone who has abandoned fiction for another form of storytelling that feels more immediate and intimate. It's not surprising to find out that Matthew Vollmer has also co-authored a book with David Shields, who at this point is infamous (maybe even hated?) for suggesting creative nonfiction has an artistic value that fiction no longer seems to possess. No part of Permanent Exhibit seems to embody this repudiation more than the essay that details a falling out Vollmer has with his mentor, a writer of fiction and an early booster of Vollmer's fictional work. It's obviously difficult emotional territory for Vollmer, and out of all the essays here I can't help but read it as an ultimate cord cutting with fiction. 

Are the pieces in Permanent Exhibit lyric essays? For the sake of convenience, I'm going to call them that, but I may not be in the right there. It could be good fodder for workshop debate, the kind of scene that frequently populates this book. Permanent Exhibit is rooted in academia. The relationship with the mentor, classroom scenes, the big football game on campus. Vollmer teaches at Virginia Tech, and so the specter of the horrific mass shooting there is also never out of mind. The campus novel has been such a mainstay of literary fiction, I have to wonder if Permanent Exhibit is the first campus lyric essay.

In the email that Matthew Vollmer sent out to announce the publication of the book—the standard kind of email that a publisher will ask an author to put together when their book is about to be published, because this will spark interest in the book and interest in the book will increase sales—Vollmer included an index. Browsing through this index it became obvious that this book was Extremely My Shit, but now having read the book I can say that the decision to write an index seems like an entirely appropriate choice for a writer to make after having written a book with this kind of encyclopedic range.  

In this way, Permanent Exhibit would be an excellent text to survive a global calamity that would somehow render most of the records of our time unreadable. The people of the future who find this book will be able to read this text as a snapshot of current American moment. This is what I thought when I read the essay that brings up the crazy clown sightings of 2016. The future reader—maybe not even in the distant future, and maybe we don't need to wipe out our entire cultural memory, let's say someone who is simply removed from us by a length of time as short of twenty years—may read this section and ask, "Did that really happen?" with the same incredulity that we asked the same question as those things took place. That the book is written in real-time in 2016 is significant. Every sentence is double-cursed by that year: once for the growing sense of unease at that time—repeated high-profile shootings of African Americans, the presence of Trump campaign posters pre-election, Hurricane Matthew, the clowns—and again for the tragedy that we know will come later that year, and that continues to unravel.

Does spirituality offer any antidote to this? Does faith? There is a lot of meaning saturating the events in this book. Birds and deer appear at low points. Simply describing the actions of a normal day seems to give them enhanced meaning, a numinous ordinary. It's not magical thinking, but something more formal than that, like a personal religion. You can draw a through line between this book's spirituality to the search for signs and significance fundamental to the Protestant spiritual vision of the Pilgrim and Puritan colonists. In that way, Vollmer should be linked to that narrative tradition in American literature the same way Marilynne Robinson is. That same search for significance enters into the reader as well. It's catching. I found myself noticing coincidental things: on more than one occasion opening up the ebook and scrolling to the exact spot where I had left off the previous night, reviewing a book written during the 2016 election at the same time as another disastrous election was taking place where I live, one that extended Benjamin Netanyahu's control into a tenth year. It all felt special, the way the book is special. And the effect is that what was meant to be a review of the book feels more like a reverberation of it.

Not that we are necessarily of one mind: several times, really good intentions came with packaging that just wasn't for me. I could have done without the name calling of an overweight kid in the essay that comes to the realization that name calling is wrong. It seemed misguided for Vollmer to conclude a meditation on casual white racism by recounting a negative interaction he had with a non-white student in his class over the student not addressing race in his writing. The final closing section—about the dread November 7 after the election, which Vollmer compares to 9/11—was undercut for me by the fact that his students were reading the Tao Lin novel Richard Yates in his class that day, an assignment he defers so they can freewrite in order to process the election. The moment should highlight the cathartic power of writing, but I couldn't focus on that because I was distracted by the coursework. I wonder if the students were as well. 

Outside of the confines of the book, in an interview in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Vollmer described that the initial motivation for writing these essays was an exhaustion with callout culture and perpetual outrage on social media; his mention of the Tao Lin reading assignment in the last few words of the Permanent Exhibit seems to be there to explicitly get this point across. It's an inclusion I don't really agree with, but that's coming from someone who pulled this review from more than one venue over their decisions to publish material I opposed on moral grounds. Your mileage may vary, but I still like Permanent Exhibit despite those discordant notes.

Beyond its faith, there's a deep magic to this book, maybe even an alchemy, combining contradictory, unpleasant things into something that shines and, possibly, enlightens.