Customer Reviews

Future Missionaries of America: Stories

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Yesterday in a conversation with a friend, I actually said, "I know this bizarre guy who... oh, wait... I don't know that person. It was a character from this book of stories I just read called Future Missionaries of America." There's something really special about the kind of stories that can get inside your head and heart this way. Future Missionaries of America is a whole collection of such stories. I picked it up in Chicago last month.

However foreign the circumstances, these characters feel like the people you know and the person you are (on your best and worst days) when the veil of propriety is lifted and showing more of the mystery--of life and death and God and love. In urgent, unpretentious, poetic prose, Matthew Vollmer lets us peep in with him on the beauty and hopeless complexity of life, much like the hormone-addled home economics partners in the book's title story are peering at the exposed insides of their badly jostled robot baby, looking for God/meaning and love (not necessarily in this order):

"Shouldn't there be like a reset button somewhere?" Melashenko says.
"It's not like she's a video game."
Melashenko places his hands on his hips. "The thing that kills me," he says, "is that there's somebody out there right now who knows how to program this thing. Somebody built this. And now we're at their mercy."

Mercy, mercy me. You will love this book. It will weird you out. It will make you laugh. It will break your heart. And every time it does, it'll make you to grow a new one.

I can't say enough good things about this book, but that's largely because I can't stop thinking about these stories. Vollmer has assembled a cast of characters that seem to be hurtling through life, and, at the same time, (re)considering the inertia of it all. There's a bit of George Saunders in here, but, really, this book is much more concerned with heart than it is with its slightly askew landscapes. The collection opens with a character in motion, literally running, and I was caught up in that frenzy far beyond the final pages, well after the stillness of the final story. That, to me, is the mark of a great book--something that blurs my vision for days and weeks afterwards. That's how I feel about "Future Missionaries of America"... and that's why I really recommend the read.