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.