American Gods
by Neil Gaiman
Harper Torch, 588pp
$7.99 mass market paperback
ISBN 0 – 360 – 78003 – 5
A Review by Gene Stewart
(written originally for BRUTARIAN in 2002)
This book comes complete with a set of reviewers’ blurbs that would make Gore Vidal blush in his grave. Such effusive praise must be based on something, right?
Gaimain’s prior books, such as the novel of his TV limited-run series Neverland and the collection Smoke & Mirrors, offered us a glimpse of a serious writer doing genre work. This one has the feel of a genre writer doing serious work, but that’s not a put-down, largely because he almost pulls it off.
American Gods is a picaresque novel that focuses on Shadow, a huge guy who is just about to be released from jail as we meet him. He’s eager to see his wife, whom he loves, and eh was in jail because of the crimes of others. Now he’s ready to be sprung, and the news comes that his wife and his best friend are both dead. Both were killed in the same car crash. In the same car.
She died with a significant part of his best friend in her mouth.
Shadow’s world is shattered. HIs sacrifice has gone for nought. He is released into a world that no longer holds a damned thing for him. Or so he thinks.
He meets a cheap older man who calls himself Wednesday. This guy makes a living conning people with grifts as old as civilizations, governments, and gods. In the course of this first evening of freedom, Shadow drinks Wednesday’s mead, fights a leprechaun who’s even bigger than he is, and he’s six feet eight, and is given a gold coin with which to practice his endless prestidigitation. Shadow does coin manipulations to take up slack time and calm himself.
From this simple beginning we get… well, a simple story that takes Shadow all over the United States with a jaunt to San Francisco, where he meets a succession of oddly-named people. Most are old, all are eccentrate, to say the least, and all have that noumenal glow that tells of godly hints, winks, and nudges. Their names are often contorted and hard to squint at but it’s a fantasy so you go along.
This cutesy name scheme will annoy those familiar with the gods of various mythologies and spoil the foreshadowing, too, but that’s a small cavil, one suspects, these days.
I liked this book but it took me forever to read it. Not sure why but I suspect it was the succession fo interchangeable scenes. They just kept coming, without adding up to anyting. There didn’t seem to be a bigger pattern. Unlike Neverwhere, which was a much better-organized and streamlined book, perhaps because he was working from an already-produced TV script with the bugs already worked out, American Gods leans out of the moving vehicle and tries to grab Significance a bit too often. Or was it merely the Ring of Permanence being rushed past? It lacked cohesion so I’m not sure.
Okay, there was a mysterious and highly-significant battled looming, yes. It flickered at the vanishing point on the elusive horizon as if teasing us onward. It was to be between the old gods, dragged to North America by immigrants over the centuries,and the new gods, such as TV, the Internet, and Political Correctness. The old gods are a pretty broken-down lot by now, from neglect and lack of respect. Most barely eke out a living, with exception of lovely Oestre, who is a kind of female Bacchus. We meet him first, unavoidably, alcohol being ubiquitous. The new gods are pimply rich fat smart-asses who are also callow, unsure of themselves, and a bit dull.
The battle is the reason everything’s happening but it never gets there, except in a mostly off-stage half-hearted set of scenes mostly concerned with aftermath. By this time we have learned that the battle was just a con to sucker the gods into shedding their blood for the good of, yes, Odin and Loki. So what began as a conceit with huge potential is frittered away on a somewhat banal and Marvel Comics sort of ending.
Much of this book is superbly written. Gaiman has talent, vision, and guts. He does very well keeping his Britishisms out of the book, although there are a few, mostly nearer the end where the proof-reader were probably feeling the length a bit.
Cutting down the set-up scenes and expanding the battle into something worth of all the conniving, whispering, and plotting would improve the book. It would also lessen its big for significance, making it less literary. Make no mistake, a writer like Gaiman can write any form he wants and excel. He his better than most and just getting warmed up. American Gods is well worth reading and very enjoyable. It is also not his masterpiece and doesn’t begin to live up to the puff blurbs on and inside the covers. What book could?
Read it not as “unforgettable” but rather as just “damned good” and you’ll get a kick out of it and come away with some cool imagery, such as the roadside attractions. Read more than what’s on the page into the book and you may be reaching.
Oh, and look the hel out for his next book because he’s going to get all these elements to coalesce one day in an ambitious book like this one and when it happens it will be spectacular.
Now go outside and play while you can still catch the old gods at frolic and at ease.
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Note from 2015: This was written in 2002 when I was, briefly, editing BRUTARIAN and as we now know Neil rewrote American Gods into the preferred text I’d recommend to readers today. In the rewrite he corrected many of the minor flaws this review touched on and added a wealth of treasures, raising American Gods to his masterpiece-so-far level. That is a writing quality so high larks have trouble spotting it.
By now we also know anything and everything Neil Gaiman writes is worth reading immediately.
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