In 2016, essayist and fiction writer Matthew Vollmer began posting to his Facebook page a series of increasingly long, detailed, and distinctly literary status updates. He started simple. His first post detailed what he’d done and thought and eaten that afternoon and ended with what he’d do upon the day’s completion. That Facebook post, aptly titled “Status Update,” opens Vollmer’s latest collection of rule-bound, genre-bending essays, Permanent Exhibit. The book includes each of the 41 status updates Vollmer wrote and posted to his wall in the run-up to the 2016 election, arranged in the same order they appeared to his friends on social media.
Set side-by-side in the pages of a book rather than spaced out over weeks and displayed on crowded computer screens, the essays in Permanent Exhibit read less like experiments with genre, audience, and technology than they do a snow-globe version of this particular writer’s life and mind, all their shadowy terrors and glimmering mundanities laid bare behind glass.
Vollmer’s 2012 collection inscriptions for headstones lives in similar territory, consisting of third-person, single-sentence essays (each one begins “Here lies a man who…”) that chronicle events in the “deceased” author’s life. But while headstones offers the benefit of narrative distance, the essays in Permanent Exhibit derive much of their power from their proximity to the present-tense frames that ground each essay, most of which center on events that occurred the day he typed and posted each piece.
The essays retain the raw edges that distance often sands off experience. In “Cult Hymn,” for example, he chastises himself for demanding that his son quit singing. “Felt stupid afterward, like what kind of father tells their son not to sing?” he asks. Then he answers, “A selfish jerk, that’s who.” But Vollmer admits he wants the boy to stop singing anyway. As the essay unspools, touching on topics that range from the universal nature of vocal music and his wife’s tuneless voice to the world’s oldest known song, Vollmer’s regret fails to drown out his exasperation; the feelings run together like wet paint, untainted by the nostalgia that tints a later discussion of the songs—including a “diva-style” rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner”—he once sang to the son he now wishes would shut up. The nearness between the events Vollmer describes and his depictions of them grants his writing a pointed and clear-eyed honesty that’s difficult to carry far into the future without squashing the grace and insight.
Each piece unfolds in accordance with an internal logic that defies without exactly breaking its genre’s conventions. Vollmer’s faux status updates are longer and more meticulous than those we’re used to, but they adhere to Facebook’s general principles; the site prompts him to answer the question “What’s on your mind,” and Vollmer spills everything. But the essays in Permanent Exhibit evince a level of craftsmanship rarely seen in online spaces; their success in moving from pixel to pulp largely derives from their careful plotting and cohesion as a unit. For example, an interaction with a gas station attendant named Mark leads into a discussion of The Gospel of Mark; later, a woolly bear caterpillar sighting links to a lamentation of droughts and Vollmer’s mental image of Mountain Lake, which, as he writes, “dried up in 2009, a fact I know to be absolutely true, because I paid this so-called lake a visit when it shrank to its lowest point.” What, on Facebook, looks like arbitrary topic jumping reads on the page like puzzle pieces falling into place. Permanent Exhibit thus offers not only a comment on the digital norms we’ve created but a critique, perhaps, of our failure to fully explore the creative possibilities such spaces offer us.
The action unfolds mostly on the analog stage where daily life plays out. Permanent Exhibit meditates on the terror we face each time we step outside—police shootings, mass shootings, climate change, war, dead girls, motorists who don’t slow down when they pass Vollmer on his bike—and the beauty waiting for us when we do; the essays are populated by snake carcasses in Ziploc bags, mice our narrator pictures eating popcorn out of trash bins, deer feeding on the side of the road, dogs, weather-predicting worms, seeded clouds, a self-creating video game no single human can complete in a lifetime, shamans, magic tricks, and imaginary nights during which dolls talk to statues. The world, as Vollmer writes it, is mystical and foreboding yet worth joining, too. The way Vollmer describes his existence echoes a comment his favorite professor makes about the “intensely present moments” that, “for [Wallace] Stevens, constituted heaven.” For Vollmer, such moments occur most frequently on his daily bike rides, during which he is never “more magnanimous” and after which he observes that “I’ve done nothing to deserve a life as good as the one I have” and “thereby pledge[s] forevermore to be kinder to everyone,” until “my ride is over, [and] I’m back to my old egocentric self, exasperated by my son’s inquisitive cheerfulness … or annoyed that my wife … is crunching another dill pickle chip while I’m trying to think.”
As with Vollmer’s attitude shifts pre- and post-bike ride, little is really permanent in Permanent Exhibit aside from awe, wonderment, and experimentation. Those heavenly moments and otherworldly realizations remain fleeting, and kindness doesn’t always achieve what we intended it to; kids kill other kids, and the glaciers are melting. But we can still marvel at the pattern on a diamondback’s skin or the feeling of descending into a valley on two wheels. And we can write. In the end, the book lands on a moment of mundane compassion during extraordinary times. Having chronicled the then-president-elect’s rise through the primaries and victory in the general election, Vollmer wakes up unsure what to do, questioning the country he lives in and its inhabitants. In lieu of leading a regular class, Vollmer lets his students “write about what had happened in the last twenty-four hours.” Awed and a little confused by one student’s thanks—it “struck me as strange, since she could’ve written at any time,” he writes, but “perhaps she was simply relieved that someone in charge … had taken the time to recognize that maybe she needed to write … because what else was there to do?”—Vollmer, now taxiing on a runway en route to New York City, acknowledges that “I myself didn’t know what else to do”; takes out his own notebook, feels “the little surge that accompanies leaving the ground”; and begins, “with no small amount of trepidation, to write.”
Amy Long’s first book, Codependence: A Novel in Essays, was selected by Brian Blanchfield as the winner of Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s 2018 Essay Collection Competition and is forthcoming in September 2019. Her work has appeared in Best American Experimental Writing 2015, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere, including reprints at Lit Hub and Longreads. She teaches English at Northwest Florida State College.