As a result, Wednesday, with Shadow in tow, starts to marshal an opposition force, traveling hither and yon to recruit confreres only Gaiman and the late Joseph Campbell could perhaps identify. (American Gods, in all likelihood, will give birth to more than one thesis in comparative mythology.) Those confreres range from the more-or-less familiar, such as the Hindu goddess Kali, to the puckishly ineffable, like what appears to be the god of elision, encountered in that modern mecca to ineffability, Las Vegas.
Along the way, as suggested, Shadow travels, sometimes with Wednesday, sometimes without, roaming a nation defined by macadam, an impossible sprawl of televisions with “motel-fuzzy” reception and “red and yellow and blue lights advertising every kind of fast food a man could imagine, as long as it was a hamburger.” Gaiman once remarked, “England has history; Americans have geography,” and he herein explores that geography, tracing an arcane network of roads and streets and highways and interstates from the wonderfully realized Cairo, Illinois, to the wonderfully fictionalized Lakeside, Wisconsin, with side trips of varying length and significance to San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas, and Boulder, in a Baedeker of the outré describing a land where a fire-eyed ifrit out of Islamic myth pilots a New York taxi and a man is crucified in harrowing detail in rural Virginia and something like the Teutonic Götterdämmerung erupts atop Lookout Mountain in the northwest corner of Georgia.
Also along the way occur kidnaping, torture, and homicide enough to satisfy even the most sanguine Sopranos fan—and, in fact, to tempt one to get punny with the phrase godhood.
V
It all ends anticlimactically, sad to say. After the fairly satisfying denouement to American Gods comes what’s brazenly labeled “Part Four” and “Epilogue: Something That the Dead Are Keeping Back.” This epilogue, unfortunately, comprises two chapters and a “postscript”—almost three dozen pages of material. Worse still, in large part, it comes of necessity, because it answers questions posed in the tale proper—What did Ganesh’s comment signify? What became of sweet young Alison?—and explains a brace of earlier coincidences that seem, on first reading, embarrassingly amateurish for a writer of such professionalism.
In that context, Gaiman’s “purloined letter” goes at first unnoticed because of his skill at misdirection. (In an interview not too long ago, Darrell Schweitzer noted en passant that Gaiman, like his protagonist here, has a talent for sleight-of-hand.) At least initially, the epilogue satisfies because it ensnares the reader in the solution to the mystery suggested by the questions posed previously. Moreover, earlier in the novel, Gaiman primes the pump with ancillary narratives—here the tale of a resourceful Cornishwoman transplanted to America in the eighteenth century, there a devastating sketch of Vikings and Amerinds—which by their numbers make the ending seem like one last interpolation, thereby concealing its structural infelicity.
On reflection, though, one can’t help but echo Gertrude Stein’s “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”—American Gods ends in anticlimax, and there’s no denying it.
VI
In the end, of course, that may matter little. If, like most, if not all, attempts at the Great American Novel—and Gaiman’s working title qua published title perforce positions the book thus—American Gods falls shy of perfection, it does so in a grand tradition forgiving of incongruity, wherein, say, Huckleberry Finn and “Miss Watson’s” Jim seek to flee the evils of slavery by heading south. In that light, some consideration should go to the manifold pleasures it provides.
One such pleasure: American Gods features some fine writing of the fantastic. (That might seem a given till one recalls any number of so-called fantasies with all the panache of a laundry list.) Consider, for example, this passage, in which Shadow undergoes his first extended encounter with the uncanny:
He was looking at Mr. Nancy, an old black man with a pencil mustache, in his check sports jacket and his lemon-yellow gloves, riding a carousel lion as it rose and lowered, high in the air; and, at the same time, in the same place, he saw a jeweled spider as high as a horse, its eyes an emerald nebula, strutting, staring down at him; and simultaneously he was looking at an extraordinarily tall man with teak-colored skin and three sets of arms, wearing a flowing ostrich-feather headdress, his face painted with red stripes, riding an irritated golden lion, two of his six hands holding on tightly to the beast’s mane; and he was also seeing a young black boy, dressed in rags, his left foot all swollen and crawling with blackflies; and last of all, and behind all these things, Shadow was looking at a tiny brown spider, hiding under a withered ocher leaf.
Perhaps because of his earlier work in journalism, Gaiman also exhibits an eye for mundane detail that would escape a lesser fabulist, as in a slick early sequence wherein Wednesday defrauds a bank—Gaiman makes the scam all too believable. One likewise immediately thinks of the following account by Mr. Czernobog, a crotchety Chicagoan as gray and imposing as the bow of an icebreaker:
“I got a job in the meat business. On the kill floor. When the steer comes up the ramp, I was a knocker. You know why we are called knockers? Is because we take the sledgehammer and we knock the cow down with it. Bam! It takes strength in the arms. Yes?….Is not just strong though. There was an art to it. To the blow. Otherwise the cow is just stunned, or angry….”
As mimesis and soliloquy both, that passage shines, and similar bits recur throughout the novel. “You don’t want to ask after the health of anyone, if you’re a funeral director,” the cranelike Mr. Ibis (who is indeed a funeral director, of sorts) informs Shadow a third of the way into American Gods. “They think maybe you’re scouting for business.”
As the preceding suggests, despite its subject and its scale, the book doesn’t want for humor, happily enough. “Even if I did set out to write a bleak, horror novel,” Gaiman stated in an interview published around the time he was having the first inspiration for American Gods, “I have a strangely, cynically sunny disposition.” An example of that disposition occurs in the first chapter, in fact. In a bar, over a Southern Comfort and Coke, a ginger-bearded man almost seven feet tall introduces himself as a leprechaun, prompting this exchange:
Shadow did not smile. “Really?” he said. “Shouldn’t you be drinking Guinness?”
“Stereotypes. You have to learn to think outside the box,” said the bearded man.
In the real world, of course, such a retort would horrify: those who customarily use the phrase think outside the box also customarily traffic in dehumanizing euphemisms such as downsize. In context, though, the professed leprechaun’s use of the business jargon surprises and delights.
Similarly, three-quarters of the way into American Gods, Shadow and two of his companions encounter one of the new deities, Media, “perfectly made-up, perfectly coiffed,” who reminds him of “every newscaster he’d ever seen on morning television sitting in a studio that didn’t really resemble a living room” and who speaks with the plastic bonhomie of the cotillion crowd. The encounter sparks this drollery:
“Media. I think I have heard of her. Isn’t she the one who killed her children?”
“Different woman,” said Mr. Nancy. “Same deal.”
Presenting themselves throughout the novel are other grace notes less readily classifiable, ranging from an easy allusion to The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, to bits of offhand sagacity (“People only fight over imaginary things,” Mr. Nancy tells Shadow toward the end). Enumerating them, however, would constitute overkill. Suffice it to say that American Gods warrants readers’ attention—and that Neil Gaiman’s next project, whatever it may be, should warrant even more.
* * * *
Bryan A. Hollerbach lives in St. Louis, where he works as a proofreader for a Big Five accounting firm. His previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive.
Works Cited
Gaiman, Neil. American Gods. New York, 2001.
The novel’s British printing deserves mention. A product of Headline Book Publishing, a division of London’s Hodder Headline, it was typeset by the delightfully named Palimpsest Book Production Limited. Its cover poses the question “Is nothing sacred?” and shows the sign for the Stardust Motel beside a cruciform telephone pole. The cover also bears a banner declaring both “GUARANTEED OR YOUR MONEY BACK” and “As good as STEPHEN KING or your money back.”
Gaiman, Neil. Angels and Visitations. Minneapolis, 1993.
Gaiman, Neil. “Books Have Sexes.”
Gaiman, Neil. Smoke and Mirrors. New York, 1998.
Gaiman, Neil, and Terry Pratchett. Good Omens. New York, 1990.
Guran, Paula. “Neil Gaiman: Pretty Decent.” The Spook, July 2001.
Horsting, Jessie. “So Long, Sandman.” Midnight Graffiti, No. 8 (Winter/Spring 1997).
Morehouse, Lyda. “SFC Interview: Neil Gaiman.” Science Fiction Chronicle, Vol. 20, No. 5, Issue 202 (May 1999).
Morrison, Grant. “From My Pulpit.” Tripwire, Vol. 1, No. 16 (Spring 1997).
“Neil Gaiman: Of Monsters & Miracles.” Locus, Vol. 42, No. 4, Issue 459 (April 1999).