Monday, September 24, 2018

Review: "Vacationland," John Hodgman


By Paul Carrier

You don’t have to be a New Englander to enjoy humorist John Hodgman’s Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches, a pleasingly disjointed collection of antic essays and (occasionally) sober-minded observations. But it wouldn’t hurt.

Born in Cambridge, Mass., and raised in nearby Brookline, Hodgman also has ties to an unnamed town in the western part of that state. He holds a degree from Yale (which, as you well know, is in Connecticut). And he has spent quite a bit of time hanging out with his family in Maine, a state whose license plates promote the place as Vacationland. Hence the title of his latest book.

Hodgman was a regular on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show at one time. He may be best known as the guy who personified a PC in Apple’s 2006-2009 TV campaign pitting the suited, neatly coiffed Hodgman against an untucked, casually dressed Justin Long as the embodiment of a Mac. But this isn’t his first book. Hodgman’s previous efforts in that department include three books he describes in Vacationland as “a trilogy of fake facts and invented history” that found “a particular following among strange thirteen-year-olds.”

Vacationland’s quirky tone is clear from the outset. Literally. Here's the book's opening paragraph:

“I apologize for my beard,” writes Hodgman, who isn’t the clean-cut fellow of yesteryear anymore. “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.”

Growing a scruffy beard for no good reason, and then keeping it, is just one of the many personal quirks that Hodgman lists here. To what extent they’re factual or fanciful is anyone’s guess, but either way, they are entertaining.

Hodgman says he doesn’t like riding on city buses because they don’t run on tracks, and so could end up going just about anywhere, regardless of their designated routes. He insists on going through life playing by the rules because he figures everyone will love him for it.

He prefers hard liquor to wine because gin and whiskey are soothingly consistent bottle after bottle, while wine is mysterious, there are too many types of it, and you never really know if it’s any good without consulting  “some judgy wine priest, an initiate to its mysteries.”

Hodgman's glad he settled for pay-what-you-can counseling from a trainee when he was a young man living in New York, because he got a good deal. “You should always pay full price for a haircut,” he writes, “but if you have a chance to buy discount therapy you should grab it, because the markup on that shit is insane.”

Vacationland isn’t a random collection of nonsensical and self-deprecating wisecracks. Well, not all of it, anyway. Much of the book is devoted to Hodgman's alternately laughable and moving experiences in Massachusetts and Maine, including his discovery that the ocean in Maine “is traumatically cold. If you make the mistake of going into it, every cell in your body will begin shouting the first half of the word ‘hypothermia’ into your brain; the second half will simply be frozen tears.”

There are tender, insightful turns in Vacationland as well, touching on such topics as the early death, from cancer, of Hodgman’s mother; the importance of accepting life's transitions; the sometimes painfully embarrassing interactions in a state like Maine between the privileged and the underemployed; and the love Hodgman has for Maine. Still, the book is, at heart, more comical than contemplative, as Hodgman shows while discussing raccoons, which have a penchant for pooping on his porch and raiding the nearby bird feeder.

“Raccoons are beyond fear, and they are assholes. I tried to chase a raccoon off our porch as it was casually emptying our bird feeder in its fat mouth. As I yelled, it turned its head and eyed me with such casual contempt that I apologized to it.”


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