American Gods

At a time when the current president of the United States is known for frequently making xenophobic statements, a work like American Gods becomes even more relevant: by presenting a pluralist America, Neil Gaiman’s urban fantasy novel unveils the hypocrisy and monstrosity of those positions, tracing an overview of the multiplicity of peoples and beliefs that make up the United States of America.

The protagonist is called Shadow, a taciturn man of few words, who receives an unusual proposal as soon as he finishes serving his sentence in prison: to work as a security guard for an enigmatic man who calls himself Mr. Wednesday. Traveling with his new employer across the United States, Shadow finds himself immersed in a world where ancient gods and fantastic creatures live among ordinary people.

Gaiman works with this premise admirably. In American Gods, deities are depicted as complex paradoxical beings: they have physical bodies but must live in the minds of the people; they can directly influence and alter events in Shadow’s reality but are still imprisoned to their own symbolic essence; they often ruin people’s lives, but still depend on their belief to exist.

The great conflict in the story involves the power struggle between the old gods, of old mythologies and folklores, with the new ones, which are linked to information, capital, and technology. The former are weak because their believers no longer perform the same offerings, rituals, and prayers as before: they live in the gutter, having to become conmen or prostitutes to survive. The new ones, on the other hand, are thriving, but realizing the ephemeral nature of their predecessors, and fearing the same fate, they decide to eliminate them once and for all.

A statement often repeated in the narrative is that America “is a bad land for gods,” but the reasons for that are left for the reader’s to reflect upon. Is it because it’s a land that is ever-changing, making religions that fail to keep up with the times outdated? Or is it because it’s a land with eyes that are increasingly turning towards the individual, facing inwards and therefore dispensing with the collective function of gods?

Gaiman gets it right by presenting a complex panorama of the situation. The ancient gods are characterized by the brutality consistent with their origins, demanding blood sacrifices, and always putting themselves before everyone else. But, at the same time, the novel doesn’t deny the comfort they provide to their worshippers. The resulting question is whether the greater absence of religious beliefs today, compared to ancient times, isn’t actually a good thing and a symptom of progress: human beings, as they become less dependent on the whims of nature, ending up needing fewer symbols to explain or alleviate the pain caused by them. Moreover, the book highlights in several passages how barbarism, often protected under a cultural veil, was and still is carried out in the name of religions and their entities.

Reading in this sense, the identities of the new gods are even more appropriate, since there is no denying that the 21st century is being marked by countless acts of immense violence committed in the name of money, technological power, and the monopoly of information, while the media foments hate and sell it as a product to its consumers. The character Media, for example, is openly treated like a villain in the narrative, and when she intimidates Shadow, she threatens to change society’s concept of him, alerting him to her power.

And that leads us to one the book greatest weakness. Gaiman opposes the old, forgotten, gods to the new, temporary ones, but forgets to bring to the discussion old religious institutions that remain with great power today. The Catholic Church and Protestantism, for example, despite still having an immense influence on Western and American culture, are curiously absent from the novel, being mentioned briefly and indirectly – almost as a humorous addendum – and only in the appendices – which makes the discussion raised thematically incomplete.

As for form, American Gods is structured like a road movie, episodically: Shadow embarks a long tour of the United States, meeting one group of gods at a time. It is a novel more filled with ideas than important events.

The novel’s central theme lies in trying to point out how America is basically composed of immigrants: even the Indians are not exactly natives, as they came to the United States from Asia over 15,000 years ago during the last ice age – an event that is even illustrated in a certain chapter. When Shadow asks Mr. Wednesday if he is an American, the answer couldn’t be more correct: “Nobody’s American. Not originally. That’s my point.”

No wonder one of the most repeated sections in the book is called “Coming to America.” Gaiman depicts American society as one built by immigration, with each people bringing with them their own beliefs, traditions, and gods. These episodes, which focus on different characters, intersect those of the main narrative – and are arguably far superior to them – to highlight some stories about immigration.

The book doesn’t close its eyes to current American prejudices and the most reprehensible points of its troubled history. It illustrates intolerance against Arabs, for instance, by following a salesman named Salim, who, after being repeatedly rejected in his work environment, discovers that even the creatures of his mythology are having to make a living by working as taxi drivers. And, through the story of the girl Mututu, it also recalls the brutalities of slavery imposed on Africans: Mututu, after suffering physical, psychological and sexual abuse, still has to watch her beliefs being corrupted in the hands of others as her pupil starts to commercialize their religion, promising practical but false effects in exchange for money.

One of the best episodes in the novel revolves around the fact that colonization in America took place in part because of a form of punishment: one of the sentences applied in England was transportation to America – as an alternative to hanging –, where the condemned ended up entering into a scheme of debt slavery. This episode gains importance as it is thematically reflected in the very structure of the book, since Shadow comes to know the real America only after he gets out of prison.

As is to be expected, the narrative in American Gods is enriched by mythological references, usually built from jokes with the possible mundane versions of the gods: Anubis, for example, appears working in a funeral parlor as a thanatologist who likes to remove a piece from organs and eat it.

Gaiman also works with the various foreign influences that are already so mixed in American culture that their origin is ignored, hidden in plain sight. The origin of the English names for the days of the week, for example, is the subject of a joke precisely from Wednesday at the beginning of the book. Later, the character also questions a waitress if she knows the origins of Easter, with the goddess Ostara sitting in front of him.

The novel’s narrative is well constructed, full of clues and subtle rewards: the gods, for instance, always show a taste for telling stories – which were responsible for their propagation and consequent strength – which ends up serving as a veiled alert for the reader about the identity of certain characters. The songs chosen also not only establish the atmosphere of the scenes, for those who know them, but also prepare certain events that are about to happen: Walkin’ After Midnight, which plays in a bar at the beginning, illustrates the narrative function that Shadow’s wife, Laura, will eventually assume, for example.

The point at which American Gods undeniably falters is regarding the development of its protagonist, Shadow. He is described as a reserved and quiet man, accused of lacking energy by his own wife. However, there is a great difference between being introspective and being shallow: while the latter thinks about nothing, the former reflects on fascinating and incredible things, but only chooses not to say them. Shadow, at various moments, is much more shallow than introspective: he rarely adds to the events, accepting everything that happens to him with a dull passivity. If the protagonist of Neverwhere was irritating with his resistance to the fantastic, the one in American Gods is on the other side of the spectrum, boring the reader with his lack of reaction: “I’m just going along with it, you know,” he says.

On the other hand, Shadow not having a defined ethnicity works since it reflects the book’s vision of America, especially taking into account that a specific scene establishes an intimate relationship between the character and the earth, placing him as its representative. However, the many scenes throughout the book about dreams and nightmares with Shadow eventually become repetitive – even if their presence is duly contextualized thanks to their connections with Nordic mythology.

Finally, it is curious to notice how the characters of Mr. Wood and Mr. Stone can be seen as prototypes for Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar in Neverwhere. The similarities between the two pairs are numerous: the presentation of their names (always in pairs with the honorific title); their sick personality (they all tell jokes in moments of extreme violence, trivializing it), their narrative function as bizarre torturers (and the contrast of this function with their good clothes and manners); and finally the fact that they complement each other to the point of appearing like one single unit (“While they looked nothing alike, Shadow found himself suspecting that on some level, possibly cellular, the two men were identical.”)

American Gods is not only fun and well-constructed, but also vital to think about the current political climate. Considering that art has the ability to revive people’s empathy – as the chapter about the slave Mututu correctly points out – this novel has the potential to do wonders with those who support speeches like those of Donald Trump.