ortune hasn't exactly smiled on Shadow any time recently. Serving a three-year prison sentence wasn't too tough for a man as big and imposing as Shadow; it was killing time that was the hard part. Teaching himself coin tricks helped; reading Herodotus helped; thinking about how much he loved his wife, Laura, helped even more.
But just weeks before he's to be released, Shadow can't help but feel anxious. He's got this feeling like a storm's coming, a big storm--if only it would rain, or snow, or something. When he hears he's going to be let out of prison a few days early, Shadow's apprehensive, and with good cause. His wife's just died in a car crash. And, as he learns after attending her funeral, she died--along with his best friend in the driver's seat--in a rather compromising position.
Jobless, aimless and hopeless, Shadow then finds himself repeatedly running into a most uncanny character who knows way too much about Shadow and who keeps offering the ex-con work. The strange man calls himself Mr. Wednesday, and he wants to hire Shadow as a bodyguard and errand boy.
As it just so happens, Wednesday's an avatar of one of the many deities brought over to this land called America over myriad generations in the hearts and minds of hosts of immigrants. But America's never been a good place for gods, and things have been getting even worse for the old ones recently. The new gods--"gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone, of radio and hospital and television, gods of plastic and of beeper and of neon"--are threatening to wipe out the old, and Wednesday has charged himself with the difficult task of uniting the old ones against the new.
Even though he's far from believing Wednesday's mad claims, Shadow accepts anyway--what the hell, what's he got to lose? It's not like Laura's just going to come back from the dead and show up in Shadow's room one day, right? Right?
An American tapestry
American Gods is nothing short of an odyssey; Shadow's journey is an epic one. Most readers may know Gaiman from The Sandman comic-book series or from his 1997 novel, Neverwhere. In this hefty work, Neil Gaiman (a self-described "Englishman who lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota") employs his rich skills in weaving the everyday and the otherworldly to create a fascinating tapestry of characters and stories. The voices of these characters and stories, these humans and gods, tall tales and myths, are as engrossing as they are variegated.
For the most part, the narrative alternates between the story of Wednesday's and Shadow's many travels and travails as the war between the gods brews, and various "coming-to-America" stories, which are Gaiman's ways of exploring and explaining the fantastical and ugly America he's envisioned. The tone of the novel varies from insightful and meditative to gruesome and chilling, and Gaiman shows readers that wisdom can be found in all kinds of tales--be they prison lore, the braggings of a grifter, the history of a people or the divinely inspired sagas of heroes and deities.
Just as its subjects do, however, American Gods does have its imperfections. Gaiman's accounts of just how mind-numbing, soul-crushing and life-threatening a long and ruthless Midwestern winter (in which most of the action of the novel takes place) can be, and of just how strange and wonderful the lands and lives of gods and dreams can be, are largely quite effective and affecting. But some of these passages move a bit slowly and feel even redundant at times. American Gods is an ambitious work, and Gaiman's obviously challenged himself in a number of ways in this, his most recent novel. America in its entirety is a big and difficult landscape to wrap a book around, which in many ways is what the author is trying to do.
All this isn't to say that this book isn't an all-around great read, however. The strong, silent and thoughtful Shadow is an appealing and approachable vessel for all of the novel's mundane and sublime considerations, someone many readers won't mind following all around the country and all around existence itself. Reading American Gods gives the feeling of having really gone somewhere--and back.
