Hugo Review: AMERICAN GODS
Okay, so, I think before I begin this one I have a little disclosure to make: I didn’t actually read this one for the Hugo quest, but instead read it a couple of years ago because I wanted to read it. Generally speaking I’ve been skipping books that I’ve already read in the interests of time and not reviewing them because I felt my impression of them was too long ago to give a good review. For AMERICAN GODS, though, that’s not really true, as I read it during the winter of 2009 and I can remember it well enough to review.
A lot of people really love this book. I liked it a lot, but I can’t say I really loved it.
From a viewpoint of cultural discourse, AMERICAN GODS is a really fascinating document. American Gods is about American culture, and about how the beliefs that immigrants brought on their boats with them and the beliefs of modern America can appear to be at war at times. It has a bit of ancient culture, a bit of nostalgia for the lost traditions that wander about our world, and a bit of traveling salesman/world’s largest ball of twine Americanism. It’s a wonderful mosaic of the ingredients of this country.
It’s by Neil Gaiman, who started out his career in the UK as an author of prose stories and comics and has since earned a place as a literary rockstar, moved to the US, and written too many fantastic things to count. Well, actually, you could probably count them, but let’s just finish by saying he’s a legend instead. There’s a great profile of him that The New Yorker did a year or two ago, and if you want to know more, read that.
The point that I’m trying to make with the history is that only a guy like Neil Gaiman could have written this book. I feel kind of confident saying that, but let’s be clear: a lot of what I’m about to say is just guessing. Neil Gaiman was born in the UK to Jewish parents, and his family had some ties to Scientology. Then he moved to the US. He’s got “outsider” written all over him, or at least, he came to US culture as an outsider. I’ve got some of that in my own life; I’m a Canadian-American Jew. There are times when I’d thought about how a book like AMERICAN GODS could be written, before I knew it existed, because there are certain things you see when you feel like an outsider that are hard to see when you’re steeped in the culture.
If the United States is a melting pot, some pieces melt a little slower than others, and Neil Gaiman had that advantage of objectivity when looking at how the US is put together. He researched the hell out of this book, and it really shows. It’s a beautiful work in that respect, showing you a lot of where the US came from in a contemporary style. If you’re looking for what it means to be an American on a deeper level than what you hear from politicians, this book might just show that to you.
A few of these things weren’t so new to me, so maybe some of the mind blowing effects of the book were lost on me, and in the end, I found something lacking in the characters.
The supporting characters, the gods who were created by the cultures brought to the US by immigrants, are all very full and wonderful and exciting, but there’s something about Gaiman’s earlier novel protagonists that I’ve found missing. Shadow and Laura both have a very flat affect, meaning that their emotions do not seem to break the surface of their overall character. I cannot tell you what these people are like, because I do not know if they are really like anything or anyone.
This is a problem I see a lot in novels written by comics authors. It’s also true in NEVERWHERE, of the protagonist Roger. My theory is that comics authors come to rely on the art to convey emotion, and their viewpoint character comes to serve as a “window” onto the other characters that replaces the comic panel. This leads to viewpoint characters being very flat by necessity, because any affect on their part would result in tinting of the window.
It’s the biggest problem—it may even be the only problem—that AMERICAN GODS has.
Either way, I strongly recommend it. It has a good story, it is an important cultural document, and it’s fun to read. Shadow may be a bit empty, at the end of the day, but that shouldn’t stop you from reading AMERICAN GODS.
