Medallion Status by John Hodgman - A Review / by Erin Wade

Medallion Status

With his last book, Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches, John Hodgman broke away from his prior role as a purveyor of tomes of fake knowledge and began to delve into the real world and his own life. This was done to good effect, as I discussed at the time, both light and funny and still emotionally poignant and touching.

To call Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms a follow-up to that work is unfair and misleading. In this new book, John Hodgman is once again the protagonist - it is, after all, a series of essays about his life experiences. As such, it continues to present his sardonic yet sincere and endearing perspective.

But while Vacationland presented much of its story as reflection - about growing and becoming - Medallion Status spends much more time on Hodgman in current day, or at least in recent day. In this respect it presents a man struggling with competing ideas of the importance of status and family while recognizing and coping with inevitable change. For Hodgman this change is reflected in part in the transition from, as he describes it himself, being a "minor" television personality to being someone who, increasingly, isn’t on television.

Obviously this isn’t an experience most of us have had - though he delightfully writes portions of the book from an instructional perspective, as if you are, in fact, the person having the experience - but many of us of a certain age and beyond have experienced transitions in life where things that we’ve done and loved for years are no longer a part of what we do. Our own status changes with those transitions, in one direction or the other, whether we like it or not. It starts early and persists throughout life - consider the transition from high school to college, college to the world of work, or transitioning from one job to the next. Each confers a change in status, and that direction is not always on the upswing. We see the same things with family and friends and so on. And ultimately, that is the core of this book - working through those transitions.

In the course of that journey, Hodgman alternates in a range between wry and bordering on being a little silly. All of it is artfully composed, as is all of his writing, and there are many touching moments in-between those of humor. He is often painfully honest, and reveals things about himself and the way he feels about components of his world that reflects a courage I think it would be hard to replicate. In fact, one of the things I always appreciate about John Hodgman’s work is that he is always funny, but he’s never mean spirited, except possibly towards himself (and that to good effect).

As is usually the case for me, I listened to Medallion Status as an audiobook. The book is read by Hodgman himself, and this is always a good thing in his case. Hodgman is intimately familiar with his own written voice, and hearing him perform his book further emphasizes and clarifies the humor and poignancy the words already contain (this is not true of all authors). Like David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell, Hodgman is an author for whom I will wait for the audio version of their work not just for convenience but because their readings amplify already great material.

For those of us fortunate enough to live in the western first world, the holiday season is somewhat of an exercise in irony: We struggle with what to get for people who need nothing, while they in turn struggle with that same, unneeded task on our behalf. And studies show that people ultimately appreciate and remember experiences far more than things over the longer term. The beautiful thing about a book is that it is both a thing and an experience. Give the person in your life who loves reading this sort of work Medallion Status and you will be giving them a thing to treasure, and an experience to remember.

In fact, while you are considering this book, you may also want to consider John Hodgman’s other books, which are:

The first three books are a trilogy of sorts, and they are different than Medallion Status or Vacationland. They are, in fact, "an almanac of complete world knowledge compiled with instructive annotation and arranged in useful order". All of which is to say that they are a three part compilation of an astonishing array of delightfully funny fake facts and made up trivia including information about the mythical city of Chicago and ultimately addressing the end of the world in a blood wave. You remember the blood wave that ended the world, right? In 2012?

I already emphasized above the benefit of going with the audio version of John Hodgman’s work. I’ll note here that if you are interested in the trilogy of fact facts, above, the audiobooks are not just readings, they are complete performances with musical interludes and a cast of characters that include Paul Rudd, Jonathan Coulton, John Roderick, Sarah Vowell, Zach Galifianakis, and many others.