{"id":1218,"date":"2015-06-12T16:59:52","date_gmt":"2015-06-12T16:59:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arielsheen.com\/?p=1218"},"modified":"2017-11-02T23:12:28","modified_gmt":"2017-11-02T23:12:28","slug":"review-of-american-gods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/2015\/06\/12\/review-of-american-gods\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of “American Gods”"},"content":{"rendered":"

The number of people I know that love American Gods<\/a> is staggering. The many positive reviews I\u2019d heard by word of mouth should have been enough for me to read it shortly after it\u2019s initial publication. When I further consider the impact that Neil Gaiman\u2019s The Sandman series, recently collected and bound into two attractive hardcover books Volume 1<\/a> and Volume 2<\/a> available here, had on me it should have been a no brainer. The Sandman was, after all, the first true graphic novel that I read and was one that captivated me over the summer my sophomore year of high school so much that I read it twice in succession. Seven years later, when Gaiman published another graphic novel within that universe I even drove two hours to have him sign my copy. Despite this it is only now, thirteen years after it\u2019s publication and shortly before it\u2019s adaptation for TV<\/a>, that I finally got around to reading it. As I\u2019ve been getting most of my books lately, I picked up a used copy from the library and started it in the guest room of my grandmother\u2019s air-conditionless mobile home 2 weeks before the official start of summer.
\nI\u2019d completed the book in under a week and have been since struggling with how to properly categorize my experience of the book. As an American-style road-trip quest with supernatural elements, Gaiman\u2019s stated intention, he hits the mark. Shadow\u2019s release from prison and subsequent adventure amongst American Gods certainly hit all the major plot points required of the genre. There are the grifts, high-stakes confrontations, deadly debts that require payment, evasion of more powerful forces and enough encounters with strange people and gods that keep the pace of the book at a steady pace. Gaiman even does a good job of making the few respites of action look on the surface to be just that and nothing else. But as could be expected in this magical world underlying the fa\u00e7ade of people\u2019s lives, nothing is coincidental. Of the two aspects of the book that left me uneasy one is major and one is minor.
\nThe paucity of tarrying with the more profound aspects of this magical world is the major issue that leaves me feeling slightly off about the book. I recognize that this is in part a result of my reading it while very aware of my own desires for a certain style of literary intervention. As such I felt that my hopes and desires took away from some of my pleasure in reading the book. At certain plot or narrative points I just awaited some sort of deeper exposition into the nature of belief, worship, offerings, fate, etc. that while sometimes raised were never dealt with in great detail.
\nWhat do I mean? Well ideally I could reference some of the conference papers that I heard at the 2009 NEMLA Conference<\/a> in Boston, but I cannot. Putting it into a few short sentences, however, I\u2019d say that the deeper edification possible for the reader within the book is just weak. Partially it is because Shadow, who clearly is special but we don\u2019t know why until he is revealed to be the son of Odin-Allfather and thus a half-god, doesn\u2019t represent an Everyman character by any stretch of the imagination. His initial struggle is in coming to terms with the death of his cheating wife (who then comes back to life as a progressively rotting corpse and functions as a Deus Ex-Machina at times so convenient to the continuation of the story as to be unbelievable even in a fantastical world) then learning submission to the wishes for his for-most-of-the-book unknown father, then coming to accept the magical as something that nearly everyone but himself cannot recognize but surely exists. Not that these are enough, per se, to take away from my enjoyment. I guess what I was missing was more along the lines of an individual that felt himself in more awe of the world around him and which could thus create reflections akin to those in a non-fiction work like The Power of Myth<\/a>, The Hero with a Thousand Faces<\/a>, Myths to Live By<\/a> or other works by Joseph Campbell. Having read all of these books shortly after Sandman I thought them wonderful compliments and feel that a story like Gaiman\u2019s would have been made better for such reflections.
\nThe second issue that I had with the book is the now dated nature of some of the new God characters. Media and technology are singular. As the struggles to maintain readership\/viewership via traditional media outlets over the past 15 years have shown, this is no longer the case. Additionally, some of the descriptions of the gods are somewhat insulting, stereotypes at the time. This itself doesn\u2019t bother me too much \u2013 Gods are after all often the human pinnacle of certain human qualities made divine \u2013 however in today\u2019s landscape they appear somewhat dated. I\u2019m sure that this won\u2019t be an issue in the TV adaptation, but it was a minor burr when reading. All in all I did enjoy the book, even if I did find Shadow\u2019s internal struggle to drag at times and at some points to be unrealistic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The number of people I know that love American Gods is staggering. The many positive reviews I\u2019d heard by word of mouth should have been enough for me to read it shortly after it\u2019s initial publication. When I further consider the impact that Neil Gaiman\u2019s The Sandman series, recently collected and bound into two attractive … Continue reading “Review of “American Gods””<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8e7kf-jE","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1218"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2342,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1218\/revisions\/2342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arielsheen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}