Just Finished Reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods

The novel American Gods, as Neil Gaiman puts it, was inspired by this British writer's trips to the United States and his attempts to understand its culture...especially that which differed from his homeland.  He decided to tell a story in which two often opposite viewpoints of religion and gods are combined.  Those who worship deities tend to believe that their gods exist in the real world and are independent of their believers...albeit usually jealous of other deities.  Skeptics, on the other hand, claim that gods are a creation of the believers: their existence only extends to their followers' worship, in their own minds.  But suppose that both views were true to an extent...suppose that gods truly existed in the real world but were there only because people had created them and then followed and worshiped them.  And that, like other entities, they can weaken and die, too.  Only with them, their decline owes itself to progressively fewer and fewer people following them as they are replaced by new, modern idols...

In American Gods the country, the population of which now largely "worships" the new gods of media, hedonism, computer technology, etc. to the detriment of the traditional gods brought over from the Old World by their immigrant ancestors, finds itself the site of a cosmic struggle...and ultimately a war...between the old and new deities, with them appearing as people living among the human population.  In the middle of it all is the main protagonist, a young man named Shadow who, after serving a short prison term, finds his wife has died in a car crash along with his would-be employer...and he finds himself completely disconnected from his expected future.  Enter an enigmatic man named "Wednesday" who hires him on, and the gods start piling into the story...

While reading American Gods, I found myself going down two different mental trails.  One was trying to keep up with all of the gods and religious traditions Gaiman introduced to the story, spanning thousands of years and crossing over all kinds of cultures like native American, African, Norse, Irish...and especially Russian.  I could see quite plainly that the author put a lot of research into this book, and if you're someone who might be interested in exploring various cultures and their old religions and myths, American Gods would be a good read if only for that purpose.  However, my other mental "trail" made it a much more compelling story: that concerned was what was going to happen to Shadow...and who exactly was this man, with his resigned gloominess combined with a natural compassion for others.  At times I felt that Shadow is a role model for dealing with adversity and conflict (which he is continually experiencing)...and at others, he just seems far too apathetic about the bizarre events transpiring around him.  A most peculiar and compelling character, he is...

American Gods is one of those stories, once you realize what the author is trying to do, that expects you to temporarily put your own views about religion on hold while reading it.  That doesn't mean you've forsaken your own beliefs in that area...it just means that you're entertaining someone else's ideas for a little while.  Besides, Neil Gaiman himself didn't believe in the fantastic figures he inserted into this novel: he was simply doing his best to explain his own take on America, from the viewpoint of someone having grown up across the ocean.  I recommend American Gods, but I feel that some folks may have some difficulty with the religious themes...