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Nonfiction

Propane, Peapods and Perplexities

Credit...Rui Tenreiro

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VACATIONLAND
True Stories From Painful Beaches
By John Hodgman
257 pp. Viking. $25.

“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 off into 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.”)

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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 left things 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.

David Kamp is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 8 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Home Goods. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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