Vacationland
2017
- arts & entertainment biographies & memoirs
- travel: usa & canada
- personal memoirs
- television personalities
- biography
- american humorists
- humor
- authors, biography
- humor, form, essays
- american wit and humor, travel
The story
Although his career as a bestselling author and on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart was founded on fake news and invented facts, in 2016 that routine didn’t seem as funny to John Hodgman anymore. Everyone is doing it now. Disarmed of falsehood, he was left only with the awful truth: John Hodgman is an older white male monster with bad facial hair, wandering like a privileged Sasquatch through three wildernesses: the hills of Western Massachusetts where he spent much of his youth; the painful beaches of Maine that want to kill him (and some day will); and the metaphoric haunted forest of middle age that connects them. Vacationland collects these real life wanderings, and through them you learn of the horror of freshwater clams, the evolutionary purpose of the mustache, and which animals to keep as pets and which to kill with traps and poison. There is also some advice on how to react when the people of coastal Maine try to sacrifice you to their strange god. Though wildly, Hodgmaniacally funny as usual, it is also a poignant and sincere account of one human facing his forties, those years when men in particular must stop pretending to be the children of bright potential they were and settle into the failing bodies of the wiser, weird dads that they are.
What it’s like
Wry, conversational prose that reads like a friend talking across a porch table, with sharp absurd asides that give way to sudden tender turns. The sentences are loose and digressive, full of self-mockery and detours about mustaches, freshwater clams and damp coastal weather, so the book feels like an unhurried afternoon of sea wind, pine smell and old New England summer houses. The mood is warm and rueful, funny in bursts rather than constant gags, and it drifts into quieter passages about ageing, fatherhood and the slow loss of youthful ambition. The structure is essayistic, with short chapters and lists that can be picked up and put down at will. Intensity is low: the comedy has a teasing edge, such as a beach that wants to kill him or deadpan advice on trapping animals, but there is no real gore, cruelty or sexual content, and nothing frightening lingers. It suits a rainy Sunday, a long train ride or a comfort reread, and it is for readers who like self-deprecating humour with a sincere heart, nature writing with a sense of the absurd, and midlife reflection that does not take itself too seriously.
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