Neil Gaiman
2001
Awards: Nebula, Hugo, Locus
Rating: ★ ★ – – –
At the beginning of American Gods, the main
character, Shadow, is in prison serving the last few days of a multi-year
sentence. Shadow is in jail because he allowed himself to be roped into
participating in a stupid robbery and ended up taking the full rap for it, but
he has a good heart and no intention of getting back into crime. He plans to return
to live with his beloved wife and work at a job promised him by his best
friend.
The day Shadow gets out of jail, though, he learns
that his wife and his friend have both died in a car accident just the day
before. Bereft and in need of money, he is lured under the wing of a creepy
grifter named Wednesday who offers him a job as his bodyguard/driver/gopher/assistant.
Shadow quickly discovers that Wednesday is no
ordinary con man; he is actually the embodiment of the Norse god Odin. And,
through Wednesday, he learns that there are gods all over the United States in
human (or semi-human) form. They are old gods from the “old countries” (mainly
Europe, Africa, and India, with a tiny bit of representation from East Asia),
brought over in the heads and hearts of immigrants.
But America is not a fertile country for gods. They
tend to wither and die, forgotten in favor of the modern gods of money and
technology. Those old gods that do survive subsist by stealing and cheating,
clinging thinly to the edges of society.
Wednesday tells Shadow that there is a war
coming between the old gods and the new gods. He takes Shadow along with him as
he goes around the country trying to get the tired, recalcitrant old gods prepared
to fight, as the story progresses (somewhat) inexorably towards that final
showdown.
Gaiman’s
writing is quite good—up close, on the small scale. He’s a skilled inventor of
characters and craftsman of scenery; each setting is well-described and
colorful, whether it is peaceful and dreamy or gross and oppressive. A starvation
vigil that Shadow has to sit at one point is particularly vivid and
pain-filled. And Gaiman sprinkles in several quite entertaining three-or
four-page vignettes that tell the mini-histories of particular spirits brought
to the new world, like Papa ‘Legba or the piskies from Cornwall.
The problem is that this is a very long book. While
individual scenes are often good by themselves, they aren’t well connected to
each other. The overall plot meanders, often wandering widely off track, and it
had a tendency to lose me. Every time Gaiman kills off one or another main
character, I thought that was going to finally be the end of the story, but it
just kept going and going.
It almost seems as if he went through the
ancient religions section of the encyclopedia and decided to base a book on all
of the coolest ones, so he cobbled together some characters and a plot to
string them together and dumped it all into the town from Stephen King’s NeedfulThings.
And while the idea of gods in human form is intriguing
at first, over the course of the book (especially as I was getting bored with
the overall story line) it becomes more and more tiresome and begins to feel
like a gimmick. It reminded me a little of a Saturday Night Live skit where the
original idea is good but they just work it to death until it’s no longer
funny.
 |
| Bast (Bastet) |
Some of the god representations are more clever
than others. I liked Mad Sweeney the Leprechaun and the very cat-like Bast. But
I thought the modern gods of Media and financial Intangibles were pretty darned
clunky.
And the primary god, Wednesday, is slimy and
unethical and mean. He is a grifter with no conscience. I was prepared to cut him
a tremendous amount of slack, since he was Odin, after all, but after about a
hundred pages I didn’t like him one bit and I didn’t want to hear any more of
his slick patter. And I didn’t want to hear any more about his creepy attitude
towards women (to wit: they are a dime a dozen, and the best ones to sleep with
are naïve, innocent virgins that you can despoil).
Which brings me to my final complaint: by and
large, women come out really badly in this book. They are either (a) beautiful,
innocent nymphs; (b) horrifying man-eaters; (c) motherly, house-bound
caretakers; or (d) priggish, controlling, and sour.
Many of the female gods use their bodies as
their primary weapon and their exploits involve titillation, sex, pregnancies, and/or
a lot of blood. The male gods have a wide range of attributes—they can be
furtive or powerful, showy or gray-suited, efficient and businesslike or sleazy
and alcoholic—but are rarely sexualized. Female gods are often shown partially or
completely naked as a matter of course; male gods are hardly ever undressed
except as part of a specific religious ritual. When female characters are not
sexy they are usually crabby, and the male characters commiserate with each
other about what joy-killers they are.
Here’s one of my favorite quotes on this topic
from the book: “Shadow smiled at the pretty women, because they made him feel
pleasantly male, and he smiled at the other women too, because he was having a
good time.” (p. 459)
Oh, thank you so much, Shadow.
One woman in the book, Samantha Black Crow, does
actually come off as a relatively realistic person. She is snappy, sarcastic,
and not averse to telling some tall tales herself. She goes by the name “Sam,” has
a face that is described as “slightly mannish” and is leaning decidedly towards
the lesbian end of the bisexual scale. Maybe since she isn’t interested in any
of the male characters, she can be allowed to have a deeper character
development.
If you want a better book about gods who appear
in human form to create trouble, I would recommend Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light
instead. (Gaimain does acknowledge Zelazny at the end of the book; not as an
inspiration but as someone who has tackled this premise before.)
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