Reviewed by Kira Homsher

The eleven essays in Matthew Vollmer's fifth collection, This World is Not Your Home, act as time capsules, ushering the reader into a kaleidoscopic compendium of characters and collectibles that surprise and delight. This inventive, voice-driven collection ranges from essays rendered almost as short stories to poignant first-person accounts, exulting in all of the possibilities afforded by the creative nonfiction genre and, in some cases, even delving into the craft itself with instructionals, such as "Notes for an Essay on Special Music" and "How to Write a Love Story." Vollmer's idiosyncratic style blends poetry, humor, and absurdity into visceral and evocative sentences, which invariably lead into little pots of gold: the tongues of his father's dental patients "lap involuntarily against his rubber-gloved fingers, like quick blind slugs" and an old man in a purple jogging suit is, in fact, "God, paying earth a visit."

It is common practice for 21st-century writers to look back on their religious backgrounds with an eye for damage. Memoirs, such as Deborah Feldman's Unorthodox and Elizabeth Esther's Girl at the End of the World, have opened the door for people to unpack the lingering effects of strict, fundamentalist upbringings and the fallout that accompanies leaving them. Those who choose to depart from the religious groups they grew up in often experience an overwhelming sense of loss—of community, identity, and foundation—and sometimes the only way to transcend this loss is to give it shape through words. Consequently, there is an apparent anxiety, especially among memoirists, that if an experience isn't traumatizing enough, it isn't worth writing about.

In some ways, This World is Not Your Home aligns itself with this tendency: the collection is peppered with small pockets of guilt, from a 15-year-old Vollmer wondering if he is "paying homage to Satan" by listening to Nine Inch Nails to his adult self, a father and professor, questioning whether he has earned the right to grieve the 2007 Virginia Tech Massacre. Even the narratives in the essays are often dictated rather than depicted, mirroring the prescriptive nature of the fundamentalist texts he grew up reading. "You'll know this is special, that nobody else has ever been baptized in this pool but you don't feel any different," Vollmer writes. "But aside from having experienced the event, you can't tell the difference. If you've been transformed, you can't feel it."

Vollmer sets himself apart by confronting his strict Seventh-day Adventist upbringing not with spiteful disavowal, but with humor, tenderness, and discerning curiosity, offering readers an honest glimpse into a complicated but loving family life. Like Patricia Lockwood's Priestdaddy, Vollmer's collection is laugh-out-loud funny, gut-wrenching, and warm, probing at uniquely American contradictions. In "Notes for an Essay on Special Music," he fondly recalls the church pews vibrating with his Aunt Melinda's involuntary laughter whenever a member of the congregation was called upon to deliver a "special" vocal contribution to the service. Later, in the same essay, Vollmer describes a halting, unsent letter in which his father wrestles with his "dark" taste in music, worrying that "if it was true that there was nothing more important than a relationship with Christ, he couldn't see how Axl Rose fit into the equation." His childhood might have looked a little different from those of other kids his age, but that doesn't mean that it lacked "the usual stuff" like practical jokes, "quasi-angular" skater haircuts, and "swashbuckling rooftop fights." Vollmer skates through nostalgic images and episodes with no expectation of transcendence or epiphany, holding up each token with an unexalted curiosity, like one rummaging through a dusty box of forgotten childhood toys.

The book's title, a reference to Hebrews 13:14, suggests a quality of alienation, a distancing from the material composition of the world in favor of a sublime hereafter. This theme of defamiliarization is often underscored by dissociative forms, such as the second-person point of view maintained throughout the collection's titular essay, in which a young Vollmer and his friends sing along to "We Are the World" on the radio, despite his gnawing awareness of the song's sacrilegious messages. He can't be the world, because, for his whole life, he has been told "that this world is not your home. That you're just passing through. Your treasures? Those are laid up beyond the blue." For someone who grew up hearing—and more or less believing—that this world was not his true home, Vollmer manages to construct an inner world with a firm sense of grounding, a world in which morality and meaning find resonance outside the confines of the divine. His warm, sparkling prose seems to invite you, the reader, to kick off your shoes and make yourself at home.

Vollmer writes about family and youth with equal measures of distance and intimacy, and the resulting essays emulate the nameless melancholy of revisiting your childhood home and finding everything both pathologically the same and irreconcilably unfamiliar. Reading Vollmer's prose can feel a bit like putting together a handful of warped puzzle pieces that shouldn't quite fit but strangely cohere into a mosaic of indelible images. His essays deftly archive the ephemera of a life fully and attentively lived, reckoning with the ill-fated first love of his boarding school days, the heartbreak of four lost pregnancies, and the raw aftermath of a historic massacre. In other essays, he fondly imagines the "other, invented man" he would choose for his wife in the event of his death, visits a Nazi's "underground vault containing the artifacts of the past century's most brutal regime," and meditates on space and sound, using music (from NASA's Symphonies of the Planets to the Satanic howls of Jane's Addiction to the "Special Music" of his childhood church) to grapple with complex questions about science and spirituality.

Like NASA's Symphonies of the Planets, the strange, hypnotic symphonies captured by Voyager 1 and 2 as they recorded the electromagnetic vibrations of the planets and moons in our solar system, these essays "are not symphonies. They are sounds born from chaos." And it is amidst that very chaos that Vollmer has found himself a home. The colorful array of topics and trinkets in Vollmer's essays, stories, and reports come together to form a surprisingly fluid collection, a book that shows us the remarkable power of an ordinary life.