Still Alice

I am of the belief that if an ending is good, it’ll still be good even if I know it in advance. With that reasoning, I spoil things for myself – I look up the endings of my favorite video games, I beg my husband to tell me how movies are going to turn out, I read book jackets and reviews desperately for clues as to how a story is going to end. 

Still Alice is one of the only stories I’ve read where I’ve been disappointed that I knew the ending in advance.  This story, that of Alice Howland, a Harvard professor who develops early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, is incredible; I read it in three days, devouring more than two thirds of it in one morning.  In fact, I unexpectedly burst into tears trying to tell my husband what it was about.  This reaction came about halfway through the book, and even though I knew from the book jacket that Alice had dementia, I still couldn’t distance myself from it. 

At the young age of 25, I don’t deal with the health issues of the elderly in basically any capacity.  I personally have very few health issues, and my parents have very few as well.  My husband has none, and neither do his parents.  Our parents are starting to get older, as they are all in their mid-fifties or beyond, but they are decades from elderly.  Most of my husband and I’s collective grandparents are dead; his paternal grandmother passed away most recently in May 2014, and my remaining grandmother is alive and kicking at 94 next week.  Everyone else has passed away due to variety of health issues.

But two of our grandparents, his paternal grandmother and my maternal grandfather, suffered from Alzheimer’s disease.  Both were very progressed when they passed, and both deaths were very much expected. 

I never knew what Alzheimer’s was really like until I opened this book.  The horror of it, the loss of self, is what scares me the most; I wonder how our grandparents experienced it, if they felt themselves slipping away like Alice does in this novel.  It is a horror I can only imagine, and I desperately hope I will never experience it. 

Alice is diagnosed when she is only 50, a very early-onset case; with both sets of parents creeping toward 60, slowly, I am hopeful now that none of them will develop it.  I had never considered it before three days ago, just as Alice had never once considered it in her life. This is what the book jacket spoils for this novel: the beginning of the book, as Alice starts to descend into the disease but before her diagnosis, I as the reader already knew where it was headed.  I knew her diagnosis before she did, and so some of the fear is lost.  If I hadn’t known, if I had been reading along smoothly just as Alice is living, and that bomb was suddenly dropped, the only thing to tie those symptoms together, I would have been blown away. 

As it was, the book is still emotionally destructive.  Each time she got lost, or forgot something small, I cringed for her, just as her family members cringe.  But I also started to see my own family members in her; I remember when a great-aunt developed Alzheimer’s, and while she was still alive, her husband passed away.  I remember my mother telling her that her husband had died, remember watching her grief, only to see that next time we visited, she had forgotten.  I remember the decision to not tell her anymore, how the grief was fresh every time, much like Alice must re-live her mother’s and sister’s deaths 30 years earlier fresh when her daughter mentions it offhandedly.  When she starts to forget her children’s names, when she has to ask if they are married or have children because her brain has failed her, I remember watching my grandfather ask my mom the same questions, watching my mom try to put away her own grief to help him place her again in his life. I remember conversations with my husband’s father, him trying to pass of his own mother’s dementia with a casual joke, while my mother-in-law would counsel us quietly, when he was out of the room, over how tough it really was for him to watch his mother forget him, forget her life.  By the end, I started to wonder how much I was crying for Alice’s loss of self, her husband John’s loss of a wife and friend, versus how much I was crying for my own family. 

When Alice is diagnosed, she develops a test for herself: she will ask herself several basic questions about her life – where she lives and works, how many children she has, etc – and when she can no longer answer them, she will end her life on her own terms.  She writes herself a letter of instruction, saved on her computer for her future self.  As the novel progresses, these questions reappear, and the reader can carefully gauge just how fully the disease has ravaged her brain.  Near the end, there’s a scene where her husband asks her these same questions, none of which she can answer anymore.  She has no memory of this letter to herself, no memory that her earlier self did not want to go on living if she lost that much of herself.  It’s clear that her husband found this letter to herself but has no stomach, even in the midst of his own struggle with her disease, to see her suicide through; he is trying to be supportive, trying to jog that memory so Alice’s personality and desires can shine through again, but he cannot bring himself to do it. 

At 25, I don’t think about my elderly years very often.  I think about retirement, sure, but that’s about it.  When confronted with nursing homes and their depressed occupants (who perhaps only seem depressed to me, as a young outsider), I say what so many others say: That will never be me. And like so many others, I instead express the desire to end my life on my terms instead of forfeiting control to the ravages of age.  I’ve indeed had conversations with my father and in-laws before, where they’ve expressed both an explicit forbidding of putting them into a nurse home and a wish for us: if they cannot do it themselves, we should put a pillow over their heads and let them die. 

I never know if I could do this.  I imagine that if I had the presence of mind, I could probably bring myself to swallow a lot of pills and drift off instead of submitting to the incapacity or dependence of a home.  But I don’t know if I could do that for my family; I could guard the door, I know that, but I don’t think I could bring myself to end it for them.  I think I would be like John in this book: supportive, but still clinging to the life that I remember with them, still too attached and unable to let go to do it myself.  In a way, I almost feel bad that I couldn’t do that for my family.  I can, again, only desperately hope that I am never faced with that reality. 

This is an incredibly novel.  It’s hard to read, painful in the most real sense, and full of the awful reality of what could be, if the stars are so poorly aligned.  The reality of Alzheimer’s is a horrific one, but also an important one to recognize; anything that takes away someone’s humanity must be dealt with and cured, and  we as the generation of the future must be prepared to undertake that task.  If you have ever wondered, if you have family members who have or might experience this reality, if you are part of our collective humanity, read this book.  

Visit the Alzheimer's Association to learn more or donate to research for a cure at http://www.alz.org/

American Gods

Dear god, how I loved this book!

It is dark and swirling and mysterious and I cannot believe it took me so long to read it.

Quite honestly, the only part I struggled with was the main character’s name. 

Shadow Moon (I told you) starts the story in prison; he’s been there for about three years, for a crime he took the blame for to keep his wife out of prison.  With just a few days to go before his release, he finds that his wife has been killed in a car accident and he is returning home to nothing. 

Almost immediately, Shadow is recruited by Mr. Wednesday as a bodyguard.  Wednesday, a bearded and mysterious figure with a glass eye, is working with the ultimate goal of preventing a coming storm.  The storm plot starts rather vague, as like Shadow, we are in the dark as to what’s going on.

Slowly, in travelling to the depths of cities and the wilderness of rural towns, the storm gains shape.  Two sides, both powerful, are moving toward a battle; each side of that of gods, but those gods have distinctly different flavors.  One side is made up of the traditional gods – Egyptian, Norse, Native American, etc – while the other contains the new gods of America: Media, Television, Technology, and so on.  Short vignettes throughout the novel illustrate how the old gods came to America, originally powerful but slowly abandoned as cultures grew and changed and slowly melted into what’s now recognized as American religious beliefs.  The new gods are those the old gods have been abandoned for; instead of caring for those our ancestors did, Americans now care more, even worship, more material, measurable gods. 

The set-up of this storm suggests that even though their worship is dying out, the old gods retain a striking amount of power.  They are imagined in the novel as people scattered throughout the country, people who blend into the average life but maintain their status as more than mere mortals.  Some, like the Slavic gods, seem more humbled by American life, while others, like Easter (the Germanic Eostre) have long been abandoned or replaced by Christian beliefs.  None of them have the kind of power the new gods have however, simply because these old gods don’t have the same level of worship as they once did. 

The plot of the story can be slow-moving.  Shadow spends a lot of time driving, which Gaiman thankfully does not elaborate on a la Tolkien.  Between drives, his life changes a lot; he briefly lives in a small northern town called Lakeside, where his life almost seems ordinary, and just as briefly lives with Mr. Jackal and Mr. Ibis, two Egyptian gods living as mortuary owners in small-town Illinois.  He moves through the deep places of American, like the House on the Rock, a terrifying side-show attraction in rural Wisconsin and the geographic center of the contiguous United States, outside Lebanon, Kansas. These places are much like the Deep Internet: they exist, they don’t get a lot of attention, and they aren’t quite for the average person.  But the gods thrive there; these places seem to be ‘thin’ in terms of reality, allowing the gods to move through them easily.  Both sides of the storm move in and out of the story fluidly, with only Mr. Wednesday staying for longer than a chapter or two. 

As tension increases between these two sides, their meetings become more violent, culminating in the death of….

Spoiler Alert!

Mr. Wednesday.  This move on the part of the new gods (Media and Tech Boy in particular) seems meant to inspire fear for the old gods, but instead it provides a rallying point.  When they gather to extract his body, the final events of the novel are put into motion. 

As the reader, I was of course rooting for the old gods; the novel is set up for that.  But if it weren’t, if Shadow was neutral instead of part of the old gods’ mechanism, I think I’d still be rooting for them.  Their characters are so richly imagined, so carefully brought to life, that even for someone non-religious like me, they are beautiful and seductive and clever.  To watch Mr. Jackal, Gaiman’s iteration of Anubis, move through an autopsy, nibbling at tiny slivers of the dead’s hearts and livers, just as Egyptian mythology says it happens in the afterlife, is a creation of astounding ingenuity.  Mr. Wednesday, who is eventually revealed to be the Norse god Odin, is a remarkable caricature, with his glass eye, grey beard, and affinity for pale Nordic women.  Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction and creation, wears a silver bracelet of bones, akin to her goddess form, where a necklace of skulls and tongues drapes across her chest.  Each god is written to illustrate his or her original forms while carefully transferring their essence into the modern era. 

On the other side, the new gods are so dimensionless and boring! They have interesting powers, to be sure – Media, for example, can reach out through televisions or radios to speak with whoever she likes any time – but they themselves are flat.  I’m sure they’re written that way on purpose, to make them less appealing, but it changes change their reality. 

Think about it: While there are some fantastic television shows out there (Parks and Recreation comes to mind, as do Breaking Bad and Rescue Me), many are boring and predictable.  The obsession with reality TV leaves television without plots or strong writing, instead offering viewers simple voyeurism instead of value.  And think about the ways media has eaten away at society; all too often, studies or reviews are published discussing how social media hurts relationships or self-esteem, or people deplore their jobs’ expectations that they be available 24/7 due to technology.  Media isn’t a round, dynamic, idea; it’s a flat, destructive one, and technology only enhances that. 

In that way, American Gods draws in a deep commentary on the flawed nature of American culture.  It presents the issues with that kind of worship-like attention we give to technology, media, money, and more, and when embodied as people, these things show off their own deep-seated fears about losing that attention.  I recently read that teens today spend close to ten hours per day involved with media of some kind; that’s a staggering number.

I see the positives of things like technology and media.  Obviously they have made the world an easier, more fun place to live, and they offer opportunities for connections, for story development, for deep, intelligent thinking and conversations – but those positives have a lot of negatives attached.  And when I see information like those ten hours, I have to wonder if what we’ve gained is more than what we’re slowly losing. 

The other commentary the novel draws is one I’m not sure I buy into: the loss of religion in modern American culture.  I’m not talking about the religious extremists; any quick viewing of Fox News will tell you they are alive and well.  Instead, the loss American Gods seems to be commenting on is the general loss of religious appreciation as we’ve moved away from traditions.

Even though I see the point being made, I am not sure I agree with it – or even care about it.  I’m not religious myself, though I see the value of religion; I understand why some want or need it, and I understand the power they can give it as a result.  But it doesn’t draw out a lot of sympathy from me. Too often on social media, I see people offer prayers instead of time or help, or I watch people give up on problems to instead “trust God” to fix things.  Those are the ideas I struggle with.  Being a teacher and having studied a fair amount of psychology, I understand that people learn best, feel more accomplished, and improve their self-esteem when they learn or do things themselves.  Abandoning that in favor of letting God do it for them doesn’t make sense to me; I don’t understand the motivation behind it.  So when American Gods critiques our movement away from religious appreciation, I hesitate.  I’m not sure those attitudes are ones more people should be embracing. 

In addition, and it may be the extremists alone, but religions tend to offer some very close-minded ideas about which people carry value and deserve rights.  Women struggling in many religions, as do those in the LGTBQ community; would it really better America if more people appreciated those values and moved backward into that mindset? I suspect not. 

So I can stomach some themes of this novel better than others.  But its beauty in creating these characters, and the boldness of putting forth these ideas, is admirable. 

Since reading this book, I’ve discovered that Starz is working to pilot it as a TV series.  I’m not surprised, given the success of Game of Thrones, that more channels are aiming to cash in on the popularity of novels lately, but I’m hopeful that Starz will take a note from HBO and create something truly worth watching with American Gods.  Neil Gaiman’s universe expands beyond just this novel, encompassing several other books including Anansi Boys and some of his short stories.  There is a lot of source material to be drawn on; American Gods is roughly 600 pages (the equivalent of one Song of Ice and Fire novel), so likely the show’s creators will need to expand its story.  Gaiman is working as a creative consultant/producer for the show too, which I’m sure will help the expansion feel natural and allow the darkness of the novel to translate well to the screen. 

In reading about this potential show, I’ve come across several less-than-favorable reviews for American Gods… and I have to say, I think those reviewers have missed the point. 

There are some novels like that, where if you can’t get anything out of it, I truly wonder if you and I read the same book. 

I’m not trying to criticize other readers; this is a big, complicated novel with a lot going on and a slow, steady pace.  It takes a lot of work to read without a ton of action, and the pay-off is subtle. 

American Gods takes some intelligence, of course, it takes some suspending of disbelief, and it certainly takes a fair level of cynicism – and I think that’s the most important part.  Without some cynicism about modern American culture, the pay-off just isn’t there; it’s going to read as simple and cliché and tied up with a bow.  The ending of this novel is none of those things; I can’t over-emphasize that.  But it is also not a novel for everyone. 

I love this book.  I may go read it again, just to re-capture its magic.