American Gods by Neil Gaiman

 

Comfort food: that very personal, very specific dish (or dishes) that makes you feel good when you’re upset, that you crave when things are going poorly, that makes an unfamiliar place seem a little more like home.  I’ve got mine, and I’ve also got the literary analog to comfort food.  “Comfort book” sounds a little strange, but that’s what it is.  And what that book is, is American Gods by Neil Gaiman.  (I’ve also got a comfort movie, “Spirited Away,” but of course this is a book blog and I won’t go there right now.)

I read American Gods every three months or so.  I can't seem to help myself - I'm drawn to it like no other book I own.  I was the type to read the Harry Potter series from start to finish every summer, so this re-reading of books is not new for me.  There’s something about American Gods that’s different, though.  I get something new out of it every time I read it.  Maybe it’s a line I somehow didn’t catch before, or a joke that just now makes sense, or a piece of foreshadowing that finally clicks into place.  But no matter what, the fact remains that every time, every time, I find something new, and that keeps me returning to the novel. 

When someone sees me reading and asks, “What are you reading?” I like to sum it up by genre first, then plot summary if they seem interested.  For instance, if I was reading A Game of Thrones, I’d characterize it by saying, “It’s the first in a fantasy series, like ‘The Sopranos’ in medieval times.”  Or Twilight (gods forbid) would be, “A vampire romance novel for teenagers.”   I can’t be nearly as concise or precise for American Gods.  The best I can get out is, “It’s like, sort of fantasy but set in the real world, kind of sci-fi but without any science – okay, there’s gods and they’re living in America because all the settlers and immigrants brought their beliefs from other countries, expect America is a bad place for gods so they’re starting to die from lack of worship, so they're trying to stay relevant and fighting for their spiritual survival.”

Maybe the best genre label for it is “modern mythology” (which isn't a real genre at all, although it should be).  Shadow, the protagonist, is released from prison after serving three years for an arguably justified crime; with no prospects and little to live for, he is hired as a bodyguard for a self-proclaimed con-man calling himself “Mr. Wednesday.”  It soon becomes clear (very soon, for readers well versed in world mythologies) that Wednesday and the other characters Shadow encounter are not humans, but gods.  Anansi, Anubis, Kali, and many other ancient deities make appearances (I won’t name-drop any more of them, for risk of spoiling some plot points).  The main thrust of the story is this: these old gods, who were carried to the New World in the minds and hearts of their worshipers, are being forgotten, while new gods – those of the Internet, plastic surgery, highways, and television – are gaining strength and threatening to push them into extinction. 

Beyond that, the book is alternately exciting, terrifying, disturbing, amusing, thought-provoking, and poignant, with enough twists and side-plots to keep you guessing and entertained.  It’s a sweeping novel that covers the entire continental United States.  It would make an incredible mini-series, as long as said series had a huge budget for travel and location shooting, not to mention special effects.  It’s too in-depth and expansive to be a movie, though.  As a side note, I don’t subscribe to the idea that books are just ideas waiting to be turned into movies.  It’s just that American Gods is incredibly cinematic already, and I think the right screenwriter could make it into a very good, very faithful-to-the-book mini-series.  That screenwriter, of course, would be Neil Gaiman himself, who has plenty of experience writing for film and TV.

Speaking of TV, let’s talk about casting the characters in this story.  Gaiman’s writing tends to not focus on the appearances of his characters, and it’s sometimes hard to pin down what they look like.  In American Gods, the gods are expertly described, probably because they depend so much on their images and how people perceive them.  Shadow’s physical description, however, is relatively vague and not addressed in detail (oh, I get it, he’s a shadow, so it’s hard to tell what he looks like! rim shot).  He’s a big guy - that’s pointed out about every ten pages.  He is mistaken for many different races by different people, mostly based on those people’s biases.  He is alternately asked if he has Hispanic, African-American, Native American, and Romani ancestry, but he never acknowledges any of these as part of his lineage.  His skin color is once described as “coffee-and-cream,” and his mother suffered from sickle cell anemia, seeming to indicate that she was African-American.  His father was European-American, and that’s all I’m going to say because his father’s identity is a plot point.  In any case, Shadow is hard to cast in my mind.  Gaiman says he pictures Shadow as looking like Dwayne Johnson.  I, on the other hand, picture him as a buff, dark-skinned version of Gaiman.  And if you know what Neil Gaiman looks like, you’ll understand how strange a juxtaposition those words are.  

See?  See how weird that would be?

It might seem a little odd that a British writer could write a novel about America that is so spot-on to the spirit of dysfunction and pride of this country.  To be fair, Gaiman has lived in the U.S. for many years now.  Also, this story is about America – it’s not about the United States.  It’s about the land and the minds of the people who live here, and about how we think about the land and each other and ourselves.  Mr. Wednesday has some great lines about the unique and contradictory qualities of America.  “This is the only country in the world that worries about what it is…The rest of them know what they are. No one ever needs to go searching for the heart of Norway. Or looks for the soul of Mozambique. They know what they are."  And: “San Francisco isn’t in the same country as Lakeside [Wisconsin] anymore than New Orleans is in the same country as New York or Miami is in the same country as Minneapolis…They may share certain cultural signifiers—money, a federal government, entertainment—it’s the same land, obviously—but the only things that give it the illusion of being one country are the greenback, The Tonight Show, and McDonald’s.”

I mentioned comfort food earlier in the context of introducing this book.  When I spent a semester in Ireland this past fall, this was the only book I brought with me initially (I didn’t want to weight down my luggage).  It was a good choice: I went through a pretty rough first month of culture shock and homesickness.  Having a book set in my home country, with a protagonist who is out of his depth but still manages to make the best of very confusing and upsetting circumstances, made things easier for me, at least while I was reading it. Because of that, I read the book four times in the four months I was there, and it never got old.  If Shadow can deal with gods and still keep going, I reasoned, I can learn an unfamiliar course schedule and get used to people driving on the left side of the road. 

Neil Gaiman is my favorite writer, and I’ll most likely create other posts about more of his books.  I’ll close with a line that typifies not only Shadow’s attitude when exploring this new side of America, but also a theme that appears without fail in Gaiman’s writing: dream logic, and making your way through the world as best you can without really knowing what the rules are.

“I feel,” Shadow told her, “like I’m in a world with its own sense of logic.  Its own rules.  Like when you’re in a dream, and you know there are rules you mustn’t break.  Even if you don’t know what they mean.  I’m just going along with it, you know?”