Just finished reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods. Written in 2001, the publishers have come out with an expanded version this year, and the book is experiencing a resurgence. Most modern novels are written as screen-plays, and American Gods is no different. The internet tells me the movie will be out soon. Hopefully we will be spared the gratuitous sex scenes, but I doubt it.
The plot of American Gods is this: America is populated by a hosts of old gods brought over by immigrants from Europe, Africa, India, and eastern Asia. These gods only live because somewhere someone still believes in them. They are weak and dying out because America is not a fertile land for gods, and because new materialistic gods (automobiles, internet, etc) are usurping the need for them. The new gods are short-lived because technology is constantly changing.
War clouds between the two groups thicken as the plot unfolds, until the inevitable conflict erupts at (would you believe?) Rock City on Lookout Mountain. Disaster is averted because Shadow, the anti-hero, uncovers a plot by Odin and Loki, who have created the whole scenario to increase their power by bloodshed and chaos. At the last minute he addresses the gathered combatants, stops the conflict, and everyone goes home to live (or fade away) happily ever after.
It is always good to read fiction at several levels, and I want to try and evaluate it in layers. First, from a Christian perspective: Gaiman's approach is purely humanistic. The gods are projections of men's needs and visions, and lose their power and their own existence if they are not believed in and worshiped. In contrast the God of the Two Testaments is not diminished in his essence by lack of faith or adoration. He is a concrete reality apart from any perception of him.
Gaiman's personification of the gods may express a deeper reality in Christian cosmology. One of the most humorous passages is a conversation between the goddess Eostre and a waitress in a local restaurant. When asked if she believes in goddesses, the waitress replies that she worships the inner feminine principle--adhering to an abstraction in the face of the fearful reality. Christianity certainly believes in personalities behind bad thinking.
Jesus is marginalized in American Gods. He is pictured briefly roaming the Middle East and looking lost. Shadow's conversation with him is not in the body of the text, but is added in the appendix of the new edition. Jesus complains that he feels spread too thin by the multiplicity of interpretations of who he is. He also feels harried by the number of prayers that involve solving people's problems. Hmm.
Gaiman also takes the classic humanist position that all religion is projection, and that Christianity is simply an extension of the old mythologies--that Christianity stole the best of paganism. Christmas is the Saturnalia, Easter is Eostre's day, etc. This is no place to take on those worn arguments. Gaiman needs a dose of George McDonald, Chesterton, Tolkien, and CS Lewis, who dealt definitively with them (mythology is the result of "rays of celestial glory falling on a garbage heap of imbecility....").
In the end, Gaiman favors stereotypical American Indian pantheism. Brother fox and brother wolf and sister moon and brother man are all one in the loving hand of mother earth. Nothing new here.
Then there is American Gods as literature: All good fiction tells the truth. It creeps out sometimes in spite of the author's attempt to go in a different direction. Behold! Shadow, the dark hero, dies alone, tied to a tree, fulfilling a covenant with the great sky-father (Odin), who turns out to be his biological father as well (Shadow is therefore man and god). He descends into the lower regions, where he learns great and mystical truths, defeats the powers of darkness, and returns to life just in time to save the earth from destruction. He reveals the heart of a secret murderer, and grants his wife (bride??) her final wish. Shadow possesses none of the depth of Jean Valjean or Sydney Carton, or even Frodo and Sam. But there it is: the same theme stated over again. Dark truth, but truth. Astounding.
Lastly, American Gods as a piece of "americana": Gaiman seems to want it looked at that way. It is, at a cultural level, a statement about materialism and spirituality. American technological and communicative inventiveness is moving so fast that it is impossible to catch up, and American gods are changing so rapidly, that a spiritual exhaustion and hunger is on the rise. Unfortunately, many are "looking for love in all the wrong places." American Gods is a good synopsis of current cultural tensions, and reveals an opportunity for the church, if she can humble herself and learn the language.
