This will not be an attempt at a traditional book review, but rather a look at the cultural and spiritual implications within Neil Gaiman’s incredibly relevant novel “American Gods.” (Spoilers ahead)
“Locked behind bars for three years, Shadow did his time, quietly waiting for the magic day when he could return to Eagle Point, Indiana. A man no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, all he wanted was to be with Laura, the wife he deeply loved, and start a new life.
But just days before his release, Laura and Shadow’s best friend are killed in an accident. With his life in pieces and nothing to keep him tethered, Shadow accepts a job from a beguiling stranger who calls himself Mr. Wednesday. A trickster and a rogue, Wednesday seems to know more about Shadow than Shadow does himself.
Life as Wednesday’s bodyguard, driver, and errand boy is far more interesting and dangerous than Shadow every imagined - it is a job that takes him on a dark and strange road trip and introduces him to a host of eccentric characters whose fates are mysteriously intertwined with his own.”
These eccentric characters are revealed to be ancient gods and deities, and Mr. Wednesday, of course, is Odin.
The core concept of Neil Gaiman’s story is rooted in the idea that gods exist merely from being believed in, and their power, strength, and health is based on the amount of people who remember, worship, or believe in them. As a result, every single different culture of immigrants that came across the Atlantic or Pacific ocean brought with them powerful mythological beings. The Irish immigrants brought with them Buile Suibhne; the Norse brought Thor, Eostre, and Odin; the Polish brought the Three Sisters and Czernobog, the Egyptians brought Anubis and Thoth; the Akan brought Anansi, and many more. The whole idea is when these cultures migrated, they brought with them a strong faith in their cultural identity and religion, and as such these deities they brought with them were more powerful when they first arrived. However, hundreds of years after being separated from their homeland, the people (and the gods as well) slowly become less European, or African, etc., and instead become more American, which brings us to the religion of the “New Gods”.
These new gods are young, erratic, arrogant, and above all, dangerously powerful. These are the gods that the youngest generation of Americans from the 20th century onwards start to worship by sacrificing nothing but “their time” rather than blood. These are the gods of Television, Media, Internet, etc. and these are the gods that are becoming more powerful as the old gods become weaker and forgotten. It is proven throughout the book that the new gods are far more potent than the old, and what makes them dangerous is how quickly they can act, or how easily they can manipulate without need for a religious gathering or ceremony. All they need to do is turn on, and they capture the attention of the entire nation.
The conflict of the book begins as Mr. Wednesday (remember: Odin) finally says enough is enough. The new gods travel the country assassinating old gods as they become too weak and forgotten to defend themselves, and the surviving old gods feel more like prey than gods as they struggle with their own self-identity and growing anonymity. The old gods, with their power having waned drastically after hundreds of years, find themselves blending in with average people in hopes that the new gods leave them be. Mr. Wednesday believes that this is not the way gods should act, and that the time has come for the old gods to stand up for themselves and show the new gods that they will not simply be forgotten, but they will go down fighting as a real god should.
A striking tone is set every time you meet a new god, you are met with doubt that this character could possibly be anything close to a deity. The old gods are in such bad shape from lack of faith, that they seem at first to be mere bums, vagrants, whores, or drug addicts upon first impression. They are nearly indistinguishable from the bottom caste of society, and even their depressing conversations and nihilistic attitudes are reflective of how far they have fallen at the hands of the new gods. The people of America were so quick to forget their own humanity, their own culture and spirituality for the sake of riches and trends, and dialogues with these forgotten gods shows the tragedy of the situation.
That is what these gods, to me, begin to resemble throughout the story. These gods are analogous to our humanity. In these gods you find our vanity, our pride, our fears, our strengths, our faith, our selflessness, our selfishness… everything that makes us human and the stories that we have created as a global culture for thousands of years are put into human forms in the world of American Gods to show us that that is exactly what they are: human. In one of the climactic chapters, when the old gods meet the new gods on neutral ground, the differences in how they interact and how they carry themselves furthers this metaphor. The new gods can barely hold conversation, they have nothing interesting to say, and they become so desperate for modern food that they have someone drive from Kansas to Nebraska just for McDonalds burgers, to which they all complain are colds after the several hour car journey. These new gods have so much power, so much influence, yet they are so pathetically undeveloped that all they know how to do is follow orders and speak when spoken to.
This contrast is continuously played out through various mediums within the story itself regarding how the lifestyles and personalities of the old gods and new gods differ. The old gods, as already mentioned, are very human. They work day jobs to simply keep themselves useful, and to try and keep their own existential dread at bay by partaking in hobbies that remind themselves why they exist (Anubis, for example, keeps a day job owning a morgue in Cairo, IL). They live in apartments, drive old weathered cars, or simply wander from place to place. The new gods, however, are young, rich, and reckless. Analogous to a young pop-star, they are given so much power despite being only 10-20 years old before they learn responsibility or humility, and then they are dropped and forgotten just as fast, if not faster, for new trends or technology. They look for total domination of the American faith and will not tolerate coexisting with “old fashioned” or “outdated” gods. This is tragic for the new gods in their own right: if the tragedy of the old gods is the fact that they slowly die from ambiguity over hundreds of years after thousands of years of prominence, then the new gods dying out almost instantly as new technologies and trends are invented just as quickly is tragic in its own right.
The biggest value in this book, however, lies in the message about religion and cultural identity in America. After reading this book, one is reminded that unless you are Native American, your true heritage and cultural identity’s roots are grounded in a distant land across seas and oceans. In this day and age in America, a lot of people struggle with cultural identity because we have all been here just barely long enough to forget where we all really come from. We are all faced with the question, “what does it mean to be American?” and this book, at least in my eyes, answers that question, yet not in the way that many would hope. Being American means being someone or something from somewhere else; a stranger trapped in a land that is still very much foreign and mysterious to us, and coexisting in this strange land with other strangers that have brought with them their own beliefs that may conflict, denounce, or rarely agree with our own while we are simultaneously told that we are “one people under God”. We are all from different places, yet call the same place home, and as a result mix ideas and philosophies into one new culture that doesn’t really make sense and has always had self-contained issues that don’t seem to be present in other places, yet we all seem to share one thing amidst the confusion: the new gods. Yet, unlike old gods, we have yet to fully grasp how the new gods are best used to help us deal with existential conflicts inherent to being human that previous genuine spirituality helped us reason with.
I am of the mind, that if more people took the time to read Gaiman’s masterpiece, more people would understand why our society in America is the way it is. We’re taught of immigrants and all of their differences in origin and purpose, but in an overarching theme of modern-day thinking, we learn it as if they were a different people than we are, and we separate ourselves from them, rather than acknowledging ourselves as being a continuation of the same human story. The reality is, we are the children of the people in those stories. We are the children of those English immigrants giving everything for religious freedom, we are the children of those Germans fleeing a war-plagued Prussia, we are the children of African slaves stripped from their homeland with their histories erased before they could remember who they were, we are the children of the Scottish exiled for not accepting the rule of crown, we are the children of the Spanish searching for riches and wealth of this new world, we are the children of all of these different people who came (or were sent) to America for so many different reasons that it would be gratuitous to list each and every one. We are not a different people from those in the 17th, 18th, 19th, or 20th centuries, but we act and believe as though we are and pretend that their issues, conflicts, beliefs, and trials are contained within their generations. In truth, we inherit everything given to use from previous generations, and by ignoring this inheritance we allow our own problems and conflicts to go unanswered.
If more people read American Gods, then maybe we could begin to truly answer not only the question of what it means to be American, but also the question of what it means to be human in America, and why the answer lies within celebrating our differences between cultures, faiths, and nations.
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