Can anyone help me interpret American Gods by Neil Gaiman?

[Lynne50]

Just finished reading this book. I think I had started to read it before, because I recognized the first chapter. But now that I finished it, I'm wondering why I bothered. Did it answer any really important theological questions? My first impression after finishing it, was that Gaiman was way too ambitious with his gods. To really get anything out of it, you need a college course on lots of different mythologies. And you have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out everyone's motivations. After all that work, what comes out of it all? What was Gaiman trying to teach us?

I did enjoy the last part of the story the most when Shadow went back to Lakeside to discover the car on the ice. That seemed to have some real point to it. Much else, I think, was written so vaguely, my head hurt.

In my opinion, the book was summed up like this. Here is a quote from the book, towards the end.
"You learn anythin' from all this?" asked Mr. Nancy.
Shadow shrugged. " I don't know. Most of what I learned on the tree I've already forgotten", he said. You keep some of the dream forever, and you know things down deep inside yourself, because it happened to you, but when you go looking for details they kind of just slip out of your head."

That's how I felt about it. I couldn't keep all the details of the book in my head. But I would appreciate anyone helping me understand it better.

I did read Coraline, too, and the same thing happened with that, now that I think about it. I liked the story, but the ending had no real meaning for me. I thought it fell flat. Should I read other Gaiman books?

[King Mob]

I know what you mean. I read American Gods almost 5 years ago (i was 16 back then) and I really liked it. The best thing (i think) is not to try to find some "message". If there is any message i don't think it's about theology.

I think American Gods is one hell of a ride. And that ending, i love it. It's all pointless but still you know that there's something important. I like the whole sense of confusion and pointlessness, a true postmodern feeling. And yes, if you learn something from the novel you forget it before realizing you've learned something, just like the characters forget all about that god which is never mentioned.

Not all of fiction have to have a message. Personally i enjoy more the books that raise questions than the ones who try to give me answers.

Maybe American Gods deserves rereadings or maybe it's not so good after all. The ambiguity continues.

But i strongly suggest you continue reading some Gaiman stuff. He is a great storyteller. You should try his Sandman graphic novels and his graphic novel with Dave McKean "Signal To Noise". And as regards prose i've read his short story collection Smoke and Mirrors and it's very good.

[billl]

First of all, I wouldn't recommend any of his other books after this one worked out badly--but I think Gaiman would've stood a better chance if you'd tried Anansi Boys first. It's got a cute love story, a well-done villain, it's kind of silly, not as dark and doomed.

As far as interpreting American Gods, I can't find any big lesson or message in it, except maybe that there are "stances/strategies" in life (gods that we or our "rivals" might choose), and that they use us as much as we use them, and that the more we commit to them, the less we are ourselves. Maybe I'm working harder at pushing that "message" than Gaiman did, but, after your your urging, I was able to craft that much out of the protagonist's experience.

What I thought was more interesting, as I read the book, was Gaiman's presentation of the gods as being manifestations of the needs of their followers and the environment that they lived in--and how these gods (most of them) had been dragged along into North America (and were, perhaps, less at home, or--at the very least--encountered more rival gods than gods usually would). So there is a sort of stock market or pop-chart effect, where gods are rising and falling in influence/power, as needs and environments change.

Gaiman explores this idea using a lot of different gods, and the handful that play a more significant role aren't super-compelling, in my opinion. Pretty much all of them are like regular people, and then do the occasional sneaky or improbable thing. I did kind of like the whole "jeez, we're old, tired, bored--but eff those new young punks" vibe surrounding Odin and the gang he scraped together, but it didn't develop too much over the course of several hundred pages. So, yeah, I agree the book was sort of vague, and that Gaiman did surprisingly little in the way of teaching a "lesson" given the fact that he could have slapped together pretty much any combination of interesting gods, from any pantheon, in order to make a point.

One other thing that Gaiman does is present a vision of what death might be like (he has pretty much the same approach in at least one other book). Dead people seem bored, relative to the living. They aren't afraid, and they don't really hate. And they aren't joyous, and they aren't in love (as much). I think this vision of "death" might be saying something about "getting older" "getting disillusioned" or "losing passion" or something like that. Maybe. In American Gods, the dead woman didn't do much for the plot in my opinion--I guess she represented "dead" memories of lost love or something like that, something the protagonist was still attached to, but was figuring out how to get beyond, as the reality faded away more and more.

Still, for all the vagueness, I enjoyed a lot of the descriptions (smoking dead woman chatting with old lover; god trying to drink a guy under the table, if I remember right; cold Polish home filled with stale and flabby, stay-at-home deities), and was able to use a lot of the book as a starting point to think about all sorts of things metaphorically. The vagueness helped in that way, I wasn't restricted--but I did feel, the whole time, that maybe Gaiman was being lazy as much as he might have been trying to serve up a speculatory launching pad to infinite delights, just for the reader jump off from.

As I've written this, I can see that King Mob has also written a reply. Perhaps we had the same approach to the book while reading it. Still, as the first five words in his post also suggest, I think Gaiman could have done better at making the symbols and myths interact more significantly. Message-wise, "death is boredom and life is vague and pointless" is not what I generally want to read. It seems artistically lazy to me (even irresponsible, in my opinion--but that's just me). But I give him a pass on that in American Gods, because of his ambition and skill on other levels. And Anansi Boys is funny, cute, not a downer, and not at all a celebration of pointlessness. Same writer, though.

[Lynne50]

Thanks KingMob and billl for helping me understand the book better.

KingMob said You personally enjoy more books that raise questions than the ones who try to give you answers. This is definitely the case with this one. I guess it was a good book, because even with it's vagueness I will continue to think about it for along time. I might even reread it eventually, after I put it to rest for awhile.

And billl said that Gaiman could have done better at making the symbols and the myths interact more significantly. I agree with that too. At times it seemed disjointed. I, too, liked the glimpses into the gods lives. They seemed like little vignettes, but in the end I wish things were made more clear in the end.

If anyone is interested, I found a website while doing some research on the book. It hasn't been updated since 2005, but someone went to alot of trouble researching many gods and their origins. It also has many theories on who the forgotten god was. The bottom line, I'm afraid, is that all the theories are very plausible and just like the book, nothing gets resolved.
Here is the website. www.frowl.org
Thanks again for the feedback. It was very helpful.[/B][/B] [/B][/B][/B][/B]

[billl]

I had actually forgotten about the forgotten god. (And I had forgotten about that car on the ice too.) Thanks for the link! It's been a while since I read the book, but I remember some of the gods that the site describes.

I can see you are a pretty serious and thorough reader, and are curious enough to keep thinking about the book. I hope you don't commit to reading the whole thing again, EVEN if you still don't like it much--but maybe things'll go differently if you try it again, or just flip through it or whatever. Good luck if you try it! But it's not perfect, and it might not be your kind of book.

[PeterL]

I read, and, as a whole, enjoyed [i]American Gods[i]; but the novel has no great depth, so you shouldn't feel like you missed anything. Another problem with it is that a large part of it is not integral to the novel. About 250 pages could have been cut out, and nothing would have been lost.

[Lynne50]

Yes, I think if the novel was shortened by half it would have worked better, too.
Shorter and more to the point.

[David R]

Hi Guys,

I really liked this book. Maybe it is pointless but I agree with King Mob that it doesn't have to have a point to be a good read. The journey is more important than the destination, as they say.

It does have its weaknesses. The beginning, for one, seemed to me a rip off of the beginning of The Damnation Game, the Clive Barker novel - guy in prison gets out and goes to work as a body guard for mysterious boss.

However, overall I thought it was a good story expertly told, a real page turner. I loved the line at the end when the Romanian god spares Shadow's life: "There is blood but there is also gratitude," the god says.

I didn't like Anansie Boys as much. I think it repeats ideas in earlier works - the most obvious is the ancient god in a modern context theme but there are more: where Spider and the protagonist get drunk on the special funeral wine recalls the part in American Gods where Shadow gets drunk on the mead - both are a kind of nectar of the gods; the presence of a dead person walking about in the story - in American Gods it was Shadow's wife, in Anansie Boys it was the protagonist's father.

If you want a really good yarn I would direct you to the novel, Neverwhere by Gaiman. And Stardust is good, too.

David

[papayahed]

I think Gaiman could have done better at making the symbols and myths interact more significantly. Message-wise, "death is boredom and life is vague and pointless" is not what I generally want to read. It seems artistically lazy to me (even irresponsible, in my opinion--but that's just me). But I give him a pass on that in American Gods, because of his ambition and skill on other levels. And Anansi Boys is funny, cute, not a downer, and not at all a celebration of pointlessness. Same writer, though.

As I read American Gods I couldn't help but think Gaiman got into the story and realized it was just to big there were just so many places it could go that he tried to end it as neatly and as possible.

Hi Guys,

If you want a really good yarn I would direct you to the novel, Neverwhere by Gaiman. And Stardust is good, too.

David

I didn't like Neverwhere as much as I like American Gods and Anansi Boys. I thought Neverwhere was a little more dark then the other two.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Why did it have to have a message?

[PeterL]

I also thought that American Gods had little content. It was just characters going around and not doing much. But it is popular fiction, so it is intended as a diversion, rather than having any depth.

[Wayfarer32]

I think that this book has multiple meanings to it and multiple themes, which makes it hard to simply pinpoint one coherent message. Not all books will have just one coherent message, and it doesn't make them bad, or lesser as novels, its just makes it a novel that can be interpreted multiple ways.

One focus of the story is Shadow himself: Like his name, he starts off as a Shadow- he ends up in jail because of Laura, and yet he casts himself over her to take the blame. He shifts and adapts to the situations to work for Wednesday, always as a Shadow and yet always changing as whatever he is cast by (he's able to become a security guard, a theif and Michael Ansel with convincing ease). However, in the end, he dies, and is ultimately reborn as himself, nameless, and thus no longer needs to be a shadow: he can stand on his own.

I think there is also an over all message about how beliefs shift, evolve, sometimes fade because they are unnecessary (the case of Hinzelmann) , but that people themselves always remain. A quote from the book " I would rather be a man than a God. We don't need anyone to believe in us. We keep going anyhow. It's what we do " ( Gaiman, 539)


The side stories I also think to just serve to provide examples of how myths change, shift and sort of the culture of folklores and how they exist in cultures.


Those are the ideas I can throw out in a quick post. I hope it helps.

[Heteronym]

What I thought was more interesting, as I read the book, was Gaiman's presentation of the gods as being manifestations of the needs of their followers and the environment that they lived in--and how these gods (most of them) had been dragged along into North America (and were, perhaps, less at home, or--at the very least--encountered more rival gods than gods usually would). So there is a sort of stock market or pop-chart effect, where gods are rising and falling in influence/power, as needs and environments change.

I always hate to get involved in conversations about books I never read, but there's always been something about the novel's premise, as far as I understand it, that never made sense to me, and I'd like readers' input on it: isn't it a plot hole to say that the gods of the Old World left to America with their worshippers? I ask this because if we consider that people started going to America around, what, the 15th century (I'm including South America here), then the world by then was already already split into Christians, Jews and Muslims (Asian religions notwithstanding). I can't see the deeply Catholic Italian and Irish immigrants of the 19th century taking Zeus and Hera and the fairies and the banshee there; I can't see the Muslim immigrants of the Ottoman empire taking any god but Allah to the USA, and so on...

... does this bother anyone else? I can see the story making sense at the end of the Roman empire, when the so-called pagan cults still survived underground in spite of the Christian hegemony. But I can't imagine modern immigrants taking their gods to America. For me it's a plot hole.

[billl]

I always hate to get involved in conversations about books I never read, but there's always been something about the novel's premise, as far as I understand it, that never made sense to me, and I'd like readers' input on it: isn't it a plot hole to say that the gods of the Old World left to America with their worshippers? I ask this because if we consider that people started going to America around, what, the 15th century (I'm including South America here), then the world by then was already already split into Christians, Jews and Muslims (Asian religions notwithstanding). I can't see the deeply Catholic Italian and Irish immigrants of the 19th century taking Zeus and Hera and the fairies and the banshee there; I can't see the Muslim immigrants of the Ottoman empire taking any god but Allah to the USA, and so on...

... does this bother anyone else? I can see the story making sense at the end of the Roman empire, when the so-called pagan cults still survived underground in spite of the Christian hegemony. But I can't imagine modern immigrants taking their gods to America. For me it's a plot hole.

This is of course an interesting point--I don't recall anything about Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, etc. in the book. But I think the idea is to ignore the common and current religions that exist now (and that existed at the time of immigration) and "reach deeper" into the national/cultural character of the immigrants. So, just as people visiting Ireland today might see aspects of culture that are distinct from other Catholic nations (Spain, Italy, Mexico), the stuff Gaiman has the gods representing are characteristics that stretch back further and somehow continue. I don't mean to defend the idea exactly, or how well it was executed, or if as much was done with it as could've been done. But I think it's reasonable for him to include all of these gods, even if they aren't "obviously" the recipient of worship in certain American communities. Maybe in some way, the old gods would still be represented in the culture--as long as we see whimsical drunk guys, and speak of "luck of the Irish", then maybe leprechans and other stuff are still around in his mythic setting, for example. Maybe the Norse gods fit the people of Minnesota better than the Irish gods would, and maybe some communities in Chicago lean more ancient Polish gods or whatever. Even if the people themselves don't even know the names and stories of the old gods anymore, I think Gaiman is suggesting the older culture nonetheless has echoes in the present, as long as the national/ethnic character holds together or something, in communities, families, and/or individuals.

Again, I thought it was a neat idea (but didn't catch as much good use of it as I had expected in the execution), but Christianity and so on are sort of an elephant in the room, and I can't really remember if it was addressed in the book or not. I was fine with that, though--I didn't think for a moment that the issue hadn't occurred to Gaiman or anything.

[JCamilo]

No, the idea is that the gods are representations of Humankind dreams and fears, ideals, etc, turning into "beings". The old world gods lost their followers and when moved to europe found those dreams, fears, etc directed into another symbols.

Gaiman did much of it in Sandman, when he showed the god's still real and yet lost without power or even having to adapt to work in modern world (like the traveling god that had a traveling agency), thus, Gaiman argues, modern world is filled of magic as long it can be meaningful, dreammed, storytold, etc...