Vacationland True stories from painful beaches

Review by New York Times Review

"VACATIONLAND" IS A pointless little book. That's a compliment. Pointless little books used to be more of a thing. I have shelves full of them from the '30s, '40s, '50s and '60s, written by the likes of James Thurber, Anita Loos and Bennett Cerf, with titles like "The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze," "A Girl Like I" and "Try and Stop Me." These books had no urgent need to exist. They were neither topical nor essential. They were simply an opportunity to spend time with a good storyteller, a droll soul with the skills to turn even the flimsiest bits of real-life anecdotage into pleasurable reading material. Here is John Hodgman, having inherited his parents' modest weekend home in rural western Massachusetts, on discovering propane: "I didn't know what that giant white metal Tylenol out in the backyard was for. I thought it was just some weird personal submarine my father had collected. But that is not what it is: It is a propane tank. If you want it to be full of propane, you have to call the Gas Daddy. And if you do not call him, the Gas Daddy will not come." "Vacationland" is consistently amusing in this dry, almost Dada way, though misleadingly titled and subtitled; it's not a travelogue or even much of a themed collection. The loose organizing principle is that Hodgman, now in his mid-40s, has stumbled toward something resembling competent homeownership over the last decade or so, first by taking care of the aforementioned Massachusetts house and later by purchasing a home in Maine, where his wife spent her childhood summers. But the book isn't particularly faithful to this premise, veering offinto vignettes about delivering a "Samuel Clemens Address" at a Southern college despite knowing little about Mark Twain, getting into a "midlife marijuana research" phase and growing up as a willfully pretentious only child and misfit in the Boston suburb of Brookline. ("I do not know why I was not bullied more. I think I may have presented too many hate targets for bullies to get a bead on.") Hodgman likes to refer to himself as a "famous minor television personality," having achieved a measure of recognition as a contributor to "The Daily Show" and as the hapless PC to Justin Long's groovy Mac in those Apple ads from the late aughts. He has since built himself into a cottage industry, with his "Judge John Hodgman" podcast (and corresponding column in The New York Times Magazine), his million-plus followers on Twitter and his three pretend-authoritative compendiums of fake trivia, "The Areas of My Expertise," "More Information Than You Require" and "That Is All." The real hook of "Vacationland" is that it's the first book in which Hodgman is playing it relatively straight, writing not as the professorially pompous hoot-owl "John Hodgman" character but as the actual fella with that name. Fortunately, Hodgman is a good enough writer to stand on his own talent and not on the old "You'll like my book because I'm on TV" trick. He describes with tender melancholy his parents' old life at their Massachusetts weekend house (situated by a bog in the Pioneer Valley, a region comparatively less posh and scenic than the Berkshires to the west), with its unambitious rituals of smoking, watching movies and eating creamed chipped beef, occasionally livened up with outings to "look at some old junk for sale in barns" or to go to "that one falling-down hotel on the Mohawk Trail that served day drinks to the snowmobilers and had those sausages that we liked." Hodgman and his wife appropriate these rhythms as adults. Then they have kids and are "forced to acknowledge that the house had an outside." When they get their place in Maine, the Hodgmans commit the classic mistake of inadvertently placing the winning bid on something at a charity auction, which is why they now own, despite not having harbored an urgent desire for it, a handmade wooden rowboat known as a peapod. "Vacationland" is mostly good fun in this pointless-little-book way - and acutely bourgeois in its subject matter. Hodgman acknowledges this, noting that these essays were developed as spoken-word pieces in the basement performance space of Union Hall in Brooklyn, and that his musician- writer friend John Roderick once took the stage after one of Hodgman's monologues and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, the white privilege comedy of John Hodgman." That's a funny line, and it would have been fine if Hodgman had leftthings there. But late in the book he ties himself up in knots of guilt for taking on the subjects he has while Black Lives Matter protests are occurring and for logging days of leisure in 94-percent-white Maine, where "if I closed my laptop, I could make it all vanish." His once-over-lightly reflections on his privilege, while tonally consistent with the rest of "Vacationland" ("Even after a summer in Maine, at the tannest I would ever get, you could see the blue veins in my forearms, so thin is the skin of my people"), just don't come off, no matter how nobly intended. This isn't a matter of "Hey, comedian! Stick to comedy!" Rather, it's that these thoughts seem like fodder for a completely different kind of John Hodgman book, one he clearly has the intellectual and observational acuity to write, and even to inject some humor into: righteously pointed, as opposed to amiably pointless. This isn't the professorial hoot-owl 'John Hodgman' character, but the actual fella with that name. DAVID KAMP is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 16, 2018]

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Review by Booklist Review

Hodgman, a writer, comedian, and actor brought to prominence by The Daily Show and TV ads for Apple, wrote three funny, best-selling books, including That Is All (2011), brimming with fake facts and invented history. But now that we're adrift in a sea of lies and Hodgman has reached his forties that alarming midpoint he offers, instead, a piquant travelogue of his long slog toward adulthood. With his signature poker-faced humor, hilarious self-deprecation, and imaginatively audacious mischief, Hodgman recounts altered states, travel misadventures, and, at two summer homes one formerly owned by his parents in rural Massachusetts, the other on his wife's home turf of Maine battles with nature (raccoon and mouse poop), technology (a septic system, propane), and unnervingly reticent neighbors. With funny tales of fatherly ineptness, a dissection of Maine humor, scouring commentary on white-male privilege, comic theories about facial hair, a tribute to a famous yet reclusive writer, and reflections on his mother's death, Hodgman is a disarmingly witty storyteller, at once waggish and incisive, droll and tender. Indeed, deep feelings flow beneath the mirth.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Mild departures from the routine inspire neurotic palpitations in these dourly funny essays by humorist Hodgman (The Areas of My Expertise), who pegs his shaggy-dog stories to several unnerving locales. One is around his second home in rural Massachusetts, where he wrestles with anxiety about taking his garbage to the wrong town's dump (the right dump is a longer drive), gets high and builds witchy cairns in a river, and fights a seesaw battle against raccoon droppings on his property and field mice in his kitchen. Other essays concern his postcollege arrival in New York, where he revels in sliding-scale-priced therapy with a trainee psychologist ("I could talk about jazz violin all day long and she was professionally obligated to listen thoughtfully and pretend to be interested"), and his horrifying Maine sojourns, featuring taciturn locals, insufferable summer people, and blighted confections ("Fudge is repulsive... like a dark, impacted colon blockage that a surgeon had to remove"). Recurring themes include the yearning for perpetual adolescence, the baffling burdens of adulthood ("Homeowners advice: do not put even a single box of stale Cheerios down the garbage disposal, never mind three"), and liberal self-loathing ("There is no mansplaining like white mansplaining"). Hodgman's sketches ramble a while and then peter out, but the twists of mordant, off-kilter comedy make for entertaining excursions. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

This represents humorist, podcaster, and former Daily Show contributor Hodgman's first venture into nonfiction after three books of "fake trivia." Here, Hodgman drops his customary voice of deranged authority for a much more personal, but no less funny, memoir. This set of stories about his youth in Massachusetts and his move in middle age to a small town in Maine can turn on a dime from absurd fish-out-of-water small-town adventures to surprisingly affecting meditations on mortality. Hodgman demonstrates that he's capable of turning his wit upon any target, including himself, with both skill and compassion. It's impossible to imagine anyone else but the author narrating this audiobook, given his expertise as a podcaster and performer and the autobiographical nature of the material. The author's performance is intimate, conversational, and hilarious. -VERDICT Recommended for fans of Hodgman's podcast or previous books who are interested in seeing a new side of the author; fans of intellectual humorists such as David Sedaris; and listeners interested in idiosyncratic travel memoirs. ["This comedic spin across life in the Northeast will be enjoyable for those who relish the travel disasters of others or -comedic nonfiction": LJ 10/1/17 review of the Viking hc.]-Jason Puckett, Georgia State Univ. Lib., Atlanta © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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The Bookkeeper for the Church of Satan I apologize for my beard. Not only because it is terrible-thin, patchy, and asymmetrical-but also because it is inexplicable. Many people have asked me why I grew it, and most of those people are my wife, and to them and to her I say: I don't know. I'm sorry. Before my beard I just had a mustache, and that was not mysterious at all. In fact, I have grown two mustaches in my life, for equally banal, emotionally transparent reasons. I grew the first one in 1999, in the yearlong run-up to my marriage to the woman who is still my wife. I had only ever been clean-shaven before then (aside from an obligatory early-'90s flirtation with a soul patch in college), and I suppose now I was testing her. A few very good-looking people I know turn mean when they drink, mocking and abusing the people who care about them. They make themselves ugly to see if people will still love them that way. I think my mustache-thick and dark and unwanted in the middle of my round pale face-served the same function: to be repulsive on purpose. I looked like a bushy nineteenth-century president who also happened to be a baby. Luckily, my then-fiancée, whom I have known since high school and who had already seen me through various thicks and thins, did not take the bait. She did not confirm my fear that I was an unlovable fraud and did not decline to marry President Chester A. Baby. So I shaved off my mustache the morning after my bachelor weekend in a dilapidated mansion in Atlantic City that I had rented with a group of friends. I cannot remember whether this was my decision or her command. Maintaining such fogginess about free will is, I think, a secret to a lasting marriage. And ours has lasted. You have the numbers in front of you, so you can do the math. (I have never been good with subtraction, especially with odd numbers like 1999 and 2017.) I grew my second, and currently enduring, mustache in 2011. By that time we had two children, whose actual names will never be revealed. As you know, I have always hesitated to talk about my children and, when pressed, would refer to our daughter only as "Hodgmina" and our son as "Hodgmanillo." In the past I have said that this is to protect their privacy, and that is true of our son who is, as of this writing, still young enough to like us. There are many joys of parenting, but ultimately we are robots training our own upgrades to replace us. But my son doesn't know this yet. He doesn't know that his job is to grow and thrive apart from us and conspire with time in our destruction. He still holds our hands and does not treat us like we are hopelessly stupid and so I wish to protect him. But Hodgmina is now a luminously smart teenager with a strong social media presence who I think would enjoy being named in this book. So I keep her anonymous to spite her. I love her. I hope of course that she will outlive me (these are the fun hopes you nurture when you are older). But I do not need to help her outpace me in fame. Insecurely teasing a teenager is a privilege of fatherhood. And I grew my second mustache for the same reason all your weird dads grew theirs: it is an evolutionary signal that says, "I'm all done." A mustache sends a visual message to the mating population of Earth that says, "No thank you. I have procreated. My DNA is out in the world, and so I no longer deserve physical affection. Instead, it is time for me to turn away from sex and toward new pursuits, the classic weird dad hobbies such as puns, learning trivia about bridges and wars, and dreaming about societal collapse and global apocalypse." All dads dream about the end of the world. It is a comfort to them. For some, the fantasy is blunt, vengeful, and aspirational. The zombie epidemic story, as one example, is consistently popular for a simple reason: when chaos consumes civilization, you can start over. You get to be young again. All your debts, real and emotional, are canceled. Whatever your dumb job used to be, it has now been replaced with the sole, exciting occupation of survival via crossbow or samurai sword. You get to dress up and wear armor or an eyepatch. And since your neighbors have now been transformed into the idiot monsters you always believed them to be, the zombie epidemic offers you moral permission to shoot them in the head, finally. (This is not my fantasy, by the way. I have often thought that if The Walking Dead really wanted to provoke horror, its last season would time-jump five years to a future in which the government re-forms, the zombies have been cured (aside from the ones our heroes decapitated), and all the characters have to get dumb jobs again. The humans will have to work alongside the horribly mutilated cured zombies and think about what they did to survive, and what what they became, while they all sit around in the break room together with their reheated soups. That said, I don't want to sound snobby about zombies. I get it. If there were a zombie show that just featured the characters endlessly raiding supermarkets for canned goods and then stocking those cans neatly back in their compound pantry, I would watch it for nineteen seasons. Guns and power and the weird masculine redemption fantasy of white dudes getting back to running things has never meant as much to me as abundant, well-organized food.) The apocalypse I dreamed of was different, and presented a different consolation. I was in the Pioneer Valley, in the western part of my home commonwealth of Massachusetts, an important place in my life. I was sitting in the Montague Bookmill, a used-book store inside a creaky old sawmill that looks about to collapse into the shallow little river that once powered it. It was where I had written a lot of my first two books, and I was now trying to start another. But I was having trouble because I had just realized that I was not going to live forever. The thought had never occurred to me before. I am a straight white man, the hero of almost every story I had ever encountered. What's more, I am an only child. The idea that the world could continue without me was not only unimaginable, it was insulting. But in that moment, something shifted. I was upstairs at the Bookmill alone, sitting at a nicked wooden table before two open windows, their glass wavy with age. The door behind me was open and full of sun, the ancient eaves above me cold with summer shadow, the little river giggling outside as it slowly consumed its rocky foundation. I was halfway through my fortieth year, Mustache II in graying bloom, writing a book in a used-book store, exactly where books go to die. And then it was a physical sensation that I remember: suddenly I was gripped, just above my stomach, by the dumb, offensive truth. Everything ends. Nothing lasts. Not even John Hodgman. This is a truth so obvious that we build whole world religions, grandly spangled with art and rituals and distracting hypocrisies, in order to avoid thinking about it. And if we do not succumb to religion or myth, we tell ourselves other wild stories to make us feel better. The story I started that day was That Is All, the last book I wrote before this one. It was the third in a trilogy of fake facts and invented history that I originally wrote for a general audience but had found a particular following among strange thirteen-year-olds. So I thought I would treat those kids to a comedy book about everyone on Earth dying all at once. I know that sounds like a big literary innovation, but the truth was, the end-times were trending. Everyone was talking about how the ancient Mayans had calculated that the world would end in December 2012. I just added some other equally plausible elements: a giant ravaging swarm of stray dogs, a massive tsunami of blood, and eventually the Earth cracking in half to release the giant magical toad at its center on 12/21/12. Nothing you wouldn't find in any bad Google translation of the Book of Revelation, but it comforted me. Unlike the zombie apocalypse, global annihilation offered a different, better consolation: not that I could escape death, but that when I died, I got to take everyone else with me. I may not have been there at the beginning of creation, but I would be there to turn the lights off. It just felt right. You may have noticed the world did not end on December 21, 2012, as the Mayans and I predicted. I blame the Mayans. Looking back, it was probably stupid to trust the math of an ancient people. Their calendars were made of stone, and they couldn't even make smooth pyramids. But on December 22, I was disappointed. Obviously I didn't actually want my wife and children and everyone else to be crushed by a giant, ancient, unspeakable god crawling across the Earth. But I hadn't really made any plans for the world not ending, and now I was stuck. I had lined up no work for 2013. And honestly, what more was there for me to do? I had written a thousand pages of fake facts. It was every joke I knew how to tell, every story I had inside of me. And those pages, against all reasonable expectation based on my age, experience, neck fat, and asymmetric eyes, put me on camera next to my hero, Jon Stewart, and then in a series of ads for Apple. (I never met my other hero, Steve Jobs, because I was shy and still thought we had all the time in the world.) I had slept in the bungalow where John Belushi died. I had sipped martinis in the East Hampton home called Grey Gardens out of glasses I found in the cupboard monogrammed "EBB" for Edith Bouvier Beale. I had been hugged by Chuck D. I had not only met the forty-fourth president of the United States (Barack Obama), but also goddamn George R. R. Martin, who sought me out at a Hollywood post-Emmy party, reached in his pocket, and handed me a coin of the Faceless Man. And if that means anything to you, then you will also find it meaningful that at the same party a year later, he reached in his pocket and handed me ANOTHER ONE. Yes, George R. R. Martin carries around pocket caches of coins of the Faceless Man just to blow nerd-minds at parties, and I have that information because of the insanely fortunate, surreal life-beyond-imagining that had grown out of my books, my life's work; work that was now complete. Plus I had a perfect, beautiful, challenging wife, healthy children who cared nothing for sports, and I had been on Battlestar fucking Galactica. Honestly the world should have exploded just to punish me. But it did not explode. The world was ending, yes, but only in the same slow dumb way it has always been. And so I suddenly had years to fill. I didn't know how many, and I didn't know how. And I had a sad guilty sense that filling those years would just be taking up space, hogging air and attention that, in a fair life, would be better apportioned to younger, hungrier souls. So yeah, why not grow a beard? When you don't know what to do in your life, there is always the mystery of what happens if you just do nothing. What if I just stop taking care of myself? And what will come out of my face? My beard is the answer. You cannot see it, but I must make you see it so you will know my shame. Its lushest portions gather on my neck (of course) and terminate to a devilish point on my chin. On the sides, it looks like salt-and-pepper ants climbing up and down my face. The mustache and soul patch of yore are still there, but still refusing to connect to each other or any other part of the madness, probably because they hate each other. In the great, unmatching bald expanses of my cheeks there are strands of lone, black, tough, wiry hairs-like the kind Jeff Goldblum manifested when he first began transforming into the fly in The Fly. If you understand that reference, you will also understand this one: I look like I invented a teleportation pod and used myself as the first test subject. But what I didn't know as I locked the door and threw the switch was that I was not alone. I had not noticed that a man had snuck into the pod with me-an actual man with an actual beard; and after our molecular intermingling in the air between the first pod and the other, I am the wretched half-hirsute chimera that emerged on the other side. I knew it would turn out this way. But I was compelled to grow it. All men, I think, wonder who the secret man that lives inside them is and whom they will meet in the mirror when they stop shaving. They wonder if that man is better than the one they know. If that elder sage or fantasy wizard or feral mountain man will be wiser than they, and when they are lost, if that dude will light up his staff and guide them through the dwarven mines and out of the wilderness. Based on the overall effect, the secret man inside me is the part-time bookkeeper for the Church of Satan. I'm the guy who goes in every other Monday and goes through the ledger and complains to the Magus that they are spending too much money on red candles. "And what is this? Thirty-five hundred dollars for cleaning? What was that for? The sex magick ritual? Jesus Christ, you guys . . . Oh! Sorry! I mean, Hail Satan!" This is not the man I expected to live inside of me, but I am counting on him. This is a book about me and my beard wandering through three wildernesses: the green mountains of rural western Massachusetts where I disposed of my youth, the mercilessly painful beaches of coastal Maine where I will eventually accept my death, and the haunted forest of middle age that lies between them. And here is a second apology. I will be honest with you: there are no fun fake facts in this book. While I may evade particular details and change some names in order to protect the privacy of those who did not ask to know me, the rest is all the awful truth about my dumb thoughts and feelings. I am sorry for this. It is all I have left. Excerpted from Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches by John Hodgman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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