Book Review: American Gods By Neil Gaiman
Hi there, readers! Winter break is coming to a close (insert scream-crying GIF here) so I thought I’d better update the blog before I disappear for another few months (sorry about that, by the way). Without further ado, American Gods by Neil Gaiman!
Here’s a brief overview of the plot: Shadow is about to be released from prison and is looking forward to the moment where he can reunite with his wife and turn over a new leaf in their small town of Eagle Point, Indiana. But when tragedy strikes, he finds himself accepting a job from the mysterious Mr. Wednesday—an enigma of a man (if he even is a man) who’s on a cross-country road trip to recruit a cast of strange characters whose destinies, dreams, and hopes seem to be interwoven with Shadow’s.
What follows is a surreal, beautiful, and oddly haunting Americana story that will stay with you for long after you’ve read the last page.
My thoughts: First, a quick disclaimer—I read the author’s preferred text, not the original published version, so I may reference events or language that didn’t show up in the version you’ve read/will read.
Okay! So…where to start?
First, let’s talk about the plot. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a sucker for a good road trip story and the whole genre of Americana, so American Gods really hit all the sweet spots for me. There’s a whole host of roadside diners, dingy bars, and creepy and surreal tourist traps. But as much as I loved all the stops Shadow made along the way, Gaiman has a tendency to linger. He slows at odd and unnecessary places and disrupts the flow of story. For example, the days that Shadow spends in the small town of Lakeside under the alias Mike Ainsel is interesting at points but mostly tedious and made me want to skip a few pages to get back to the main plot.
(Spoilers abound in this paragraph! Be warned!) Every good book usually has a couple of subplots, and American Gods is no exception. However, I did not enjoy the rather rushed story of Alison McGovern, a teenager from Lakeside who goes missing and whose body is eventually found in the trunk of a car in the middle of a lake. Towards the end of the book, there’s a lot of curtains being pulled back and betrayals being carried out. It gets a little exhausting, to be honest, and it feels a little like Gaiman is turning Hinzelmann, a kindly old man, into a villain and murderer just to be like, ha ha! So you thought there was one good and not-so-complicated character! Joke’s on you, sucker!
If we go back to positives, though, you’ll recall that Gaiman has a gift for description (as I talked a bit about in my review of The Ocean at the End of the Lane). American Gods stunned me with its ability to conjure even the most mythical and abstract concepts into an image in my head. For example, this is Gaiman’s description of going “behind the scenes” as Shadow and Wednesday are on the run in South Dakota (think sort of like tessering from A Wrinkle in Time):
Shadow pulled the wheel down with his right hand, and the [car] lurched and jolted. For a moment he thought he had been correct, that the camper was going to tip, and then the world through the window-shield dissolved and shimmered, like the reflection in a clear pool when wind brushes the surface, and the Dakotas stretched and shifted.
The clouds and the mist and the snow and the day were gone. Now there were stars overhead, hanging like frozen spears of light, stabbing the night sky.
Isn’t that fantastic? Did that not just conjure up a striking image? If there’s one reason to read American Gods, it’s for the beautiful and haunting descriptions that show up on almost every page.
But let’s go back to the negatives again, because I’m evil. This one may be a bit nit-picky, but I think it’s worth discussing anyway: Gaiman’s treatment of his female characters is…pretty abhorrent. Like, setting aside that whole subplot where Alison McGovern gets murdered and her body is found in the trunk of a car where its been rotting for months (this is what I like to call a red flag), there’s a whole assortment of other examples that made me squirm. Wednesday has sex with a young lady who Shadow argues is “barely legal,” to which Wednesday replies, “I’ve never been overly concerned about legality,” whereupon Shadow drops the topic despite the fact that his boss just implied that he’s a rapist. Shadow checks out a teenage cashier and “idly wonders” what she’ll look like when she’s older. Laura, Shadow’s wife, dies in a car crash that’s occasioned by her accidentally engaging a gear shift while performing a certain sexual act on the car’s driver. Shadow meets a man who runs a morgue, and while he’s examining the body of a girl who got stabbed five times by her boyfriend, the morgue-owner proceeds to eat slices of her liver and heart. The multiple rapes of a magical girl named Sukey are described in detail for seemingly no other reason than sensationalism. Heck, in the first chapter, a god who’s been forced to become a prostitute to survive absorbs a man in her…let’s just say, lady parts…and then toward the end of the book, she’s run over by a car in a particularly graphic, vicious murder and turned into “smeared red meat of roadkill, barely recognizable as human.”
It’s pretty obvious that Gaiman is using violence (most of the time sexual violence) against women as a way to show the moral grayness of his characters and to remind the reader that no one is as they seem and blah blah blah character nuance, but the amount of times situations like these pop up in the book is a little ridiculous and totally unnecessary. For any budding authors out there, this is your reminder that sexual violence is not a good primary vessel for showcasing shades of morality because that device has been so egregiously misused by authors for years and years, among many other reasons! Maybe I wouldn’t be bashing this particular quirk about the book if there were some actually good and important and well-developed female characters in the book, but there aren’t. There just…aren’t, which came as a bit of a shock to me because I’ve grown up with books where that was the norm (American Gods was published in 2001, so hopefully Gaiman’s views have changed a bit, maybe?).
Anyway! Overall, I really do think that American Gods was spectacular, even if Gaiman does use some uncomfortable techniques to convince the reader that his characters are special and edgy and morally grey and such. It’s definitely an investment—it’s 522 pages, not counting all the bonus content that comes with the author’s preferred text edition. But if you’re looking to be swept up in a sprawling mythical road trip, or if you just have a passion for reading disturbing descriptions of murder, then this book is for you!
Final Score: 3 and a half stars
Cat picture translation: I’m concerned about Neil Gaiman’s treatment of his female characters and his obsession with making sure his protagonists are super morally suspect, but I liked the imagery, so…it’s redeemed, I guess? It’s complicated.
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