THIS WORLD IS NOT YOUR HOME

An eclectic collection offers essays, stories, and reports.

In this multifaceted volume, Vollmer seems very consciously to want to explore the limits of the essay form and what creative nonfiction can do. The viewpoints and narrative structures of these 10 pieces range widely in style and focus. “How To Write a Love Story,” for instance, is couched entirely as a series of instructions on how readers should construct a romantic tale. “Stop caring—as if you ever really did—about academics,” runs one passage, patterned—as so much of the book is—on the author’s own autobiography. “Roll your eyes when anybody mentions college applications, since it’s common knowledge that the only thing an Adventist kid has to do to get into a denomination-sponsored college is to produce fog on the surface of a mirror.” “Ghost House” is a straightforward autobiographical piece that mentions details like Dungeons & Dragons and Saturday morning cartoons and is told in the first person. Alternately, “Over the River and Through the Woods” is told in the third person, with none of the characters named or much differentiated (“Three months before, the woman had urinated on a plastic wand and discovered that she was, as she’d suspected, pregnant”). Presenting a collection that hinges so heavily on stylistic experimentation throws a considerable amount of emphasis on the author’s writing ability, and Vollmer’s choice here is largely vindicated. True, some of this material lapses into the trivia that always lurks around the corner in a memoir. But far more often, the author’s prose is sharp and enjoyable, justifying all the formal experimentation on display here. His characters are well drawn, and his pacing is fast enough to keep people reading.

An intriguing and often engaging variation on the art of the autobiography.