American Gods

[Faustus5]

Okay, I recently started reading this one since the TV show is coming out soon and I love the show-runner behind it. Anyone else ever read this?

[aels]

I have read... most of it? I have it, it's in the cabinet next to my bed, and I got a fair way through it a couple of years back but then I just kinda wandered off. My wandering off is not a reflection on the quality of the book and more a reflection on the state of my concentration these days.

[Anakin McFly]

I finished it recently after trying once years ago and losing interest. It was pretty good, I guess, but not as amazing or BEST NOVEL EVARR as people seem to suggest. I may have enjoyed it more without the high expectations.

[Eva Yojimbo]

I probably should given how much I loved Sandman. Gaiman indulging in mythology in such a long novel format sounds delicious.

[Faustus5]

So I finished this a few weeks ago and here are my thoughts.

Pretty good book, but overall I don't understand the intense love it seems to have inspired from so many quarters. That's okay, my tastes are probably a bit off anyway.

Here's something that puzzled me, though. The foreword to the book describes Gaiman doing a massive road trip through the small towns of the American mid-west. And the title is "American Gods". So one would expect an examination of the mythology of "America" from the perspective of an outsider.

But that isn't what the book is about. Most of the gods the book spends time with are old, and from the "Old World"--from Norse, Greek, Indian, or African mythologies, for instance. The theme seems to be that they are having trouble thriving on American soil, which is not conducive to fostering their power. The rival gods to them, those of modernity (highways, railways, the Internet, TV) don't seem particularly American at all in their essence. At any rate, they are barely touched on. America is a highly religious country compared to others in the West, with Christianity (sometimes in an especially toxic form) being clearly dominant. But Christianity is completely absent from the book, appearing as an afterthought in a postscript that is just an extra and not considered part of the "official" text of the novel.

So thematically, and philosophically, the book doesn't seem to make much of coherent sense. Up to a point I can say that perhaps my expectations are to blame for being out of touch with the author's intentions. But that only goes so far. One problem I've always had with Gaiman is that he seems to be more about cool imagery that gives the illusion of depth than he is about real ideas. Now, this is from a small sample of his work, but this is supposed to be one of his best and I see that issue repeated here.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to the mini-series. I understand Gaiman gave them lots extra material to flesh out some of the minor characters, so that's cool.

[Eva Yojimbo]

One problem I've always had with Gaiman is that he seems to be more about cool imagery that gives the illusion of depth than he is about real ideas. Now, this is from a small sample of his work, but this is supposed to be one of his best and I see that issue repeated here.

That's a very real possibility, and it's possibly why despite my love of Sandman I'm less interested in checking out his non-comic literature. It's not that I don't like his writing, it's more that Sandman struck me as the perfect marriage of his literary sensibilities and visual imagination. Now, I do think Sandman had some depth, but I don't think it was entirely purely literary in nature: eg, the multiple levels of reality juggled in the famous A Midsummer Night's Dream only works because of the complexity in how it's visually laid out, and apparently Gaiman was quite explicit about how he wanted it to look (rather than letting the artists run with it). I'm not sure how much of Sandman's "depth" could translate to the realm of "pure" literature rather than graphic literature. Still, the notions of identity, gender, and its relationship with dreams in A Game of You struck me as being well-suited to ordinary literature, though even in that volume there were certainly ideas that were only expressed visually as well.