The Symbol's the Thing

I feel like I've just woken up from a long dream.

Yesterday I finished reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods. The novel is a brilliant epic of godly--yes, godly-- proportions. Readers follow Shadow, a recently freed convict on an adventure across the American landscape that transcends all genre limitations. Channeling elements from noir, adventure, and mythology literature, Gaiman defines America in completely new terms. Not only a melting pot of people, Gaiman's America is the sorry last stop for the Gods of Africa, the Orient and pagan Europe. Immigration tales embedded within Shadow's story narrate how jinns and piskies, traveling in the minds of their respective immigrants, have found America to be the land of inopportunity. Memories of them quickly fade on this new soil and they come to resemble nothing more than lesser men and women. +/-

While this book contains elements of magical realism, it somehow seems more easily believable. The humanization of the Gods, while not complete, is particularly American, perhaps fostering its authenticity. They are characters familiar to the American landscape--con men, taxi drivers, factory workers and the like. All seem human in their attitudes, actions and morals. American Gods is not quite an indictment of America, and nor is it a glorification. Gaiman's is a complex and layered conception, defining America by our obsessions with money and power, our compulsion to define our lives by what's real and what's not and, most literally, by our treatment of the less familiar gods of yore. In the end, readers will feel like they've emerged from a sweat lodge with a new cultural understanding of the world around them.