Back in March, I talked to you about THAT IS ALL, John Hodgman’s final volume of complete world knowledge. If you’re interested in that book, it might be worth your while to check out the audiobook instead, because it is brilliant.

The link there goes to a review that goes into detail about the evolution of Hodgman’s voice, which is something I had intended to do in my blurb but ended up leaving off, largely because I wasn’t sure how much of what I thought I was seeing was in the text, and how much was colored by casual interaction with Hodgman on JCCC3 (where, obviously, he wasn’t “in character” all the time).

This is spot on, though:

Without giving too much away, you should know that That is All makes its crucial Turn when Hodgman stops writing as a familiar character, and begins writing as what we might guess is “himself,” whatever that means for a writer who is so aware of his changing status and thus his changing voice. Taking on a new voice, one that is so unselfconscious, is surely a vulnerable place to be after so many years occupying jokey versions of himself — we’ve heard Hodgman as a Former Professional Literary Agent, Resident Expert, Famous Minor Television Celebrity, and finally Deranged Millionaire (if you aren’t familiar with these, read your history). Now we are hearing from the post-post Hodgman — in other words, beyond the narrator-in-character writer there is a Hodgman voice we’ve been waiting to hear from again (I remember this voice from before his first book), and boy does it hit home. The book’s brilliant conclusion, telling the story of the metafictional Anne Darling Egan, serves as a transition not just in the book, but in Hodgman’s career — it suggests what Hodgman will do next, after the end of this series of postmodern characters. I have no inside information, but listening to the long segment preceding the closing song, I couldn’t help but think — Hodgman has a novel in him.

What I conclude from That is All is that Hodgman’s Deranged Millionaire character was gaslighting us the entire time. The truth, of course, is that Hodgman himself is a genuinely kind person who uses character as a way to express himself with a kind of wry, safe detachment. His recent Derangement is a fun side-note in the arc of his career, but careers aren’t what matter. What matters is that we do what we love, that we are with the people we love, and that we do our work surrounded by friends — that is what Hodgman has been doing by bringing in Paul Rudd and Jonathan Coulton and running gags that span dozens of hours of audio and years of work — he’s demonstrating to us what is most meaningful isn’t the jokes, it’s that those jokes are shared.