American Gods

The thing I found really amusing was about some places in the middle where people are talking in the way they talk in Wisconsin and Minnesota: occasionally I would have New Yorkers and Los Angelinos accusing me of lapsing into Briticisms there, mostly I think because people have no idea what people talk like in the rest of their country.

Reading Group Discussion Questions

American Gods is an epic novel dealing with many big themes, including sacrifice, loyalty, betrayal, love, and faith. Which theme affected you the most strongly, and why?

Shadow begins the novel as a convict, and ends it a different man. How does the novel exploit the idea of America as a place where immigrants and exiles, both physical and emotional, can reinvent themselves? What makes Shadow himself so compelling and complex?

American Gods is partly a road trip through small-town America, where Shadow can see the darker side of life that other people ignore. What does the novel say about what people will accept in order to maintain a sense of normality?

The old gods expect sacrifice, violence, and worship. How have they adapted to the modern world? What does this say about the nature of divinity? How and why have Americans transferred their devotion to the new technological and material gods from the old spiritual gods? What comment is being made about modern cultural values?

What is the significance of the illusions, cons, and magic tricks that occur throughout the novel? American Gods is a novel in which magic, myth, and the divine coexist with the normal, mundane, and human in a way that is utterly believable. How is this illusion maintained?

How does the rich background description increase the power of the narrative? What do the secondary characters, particularly the gods whose lives and deaths we are given a brief insight into, add to the novel?

How Dare You?

Nobody’s asked the question I’ve been dreading, so far, the question I have been hoping that no one would ask. So I’m going to ask it myself, and try to answer it myself, in the hopes that, like the airline passenger scared of being hijacked who always smuggles her own bomb onto the plane, my doing it increases the odds against someone else doing it.

And the question is this: How dare you?

Or, in its expanded form: “How dare you, an Englishman, try and write a book about America, about American myths and the American soul? How dare you try and write about what makes America special, as a country, as a nation, as an idea?”

And, being English, my immediate impulse is to shrug my shoulders and promise it won’t happen again.

But then, I did dare, in my novel American Gods, and it took an odd sort of hubris to write it.

As a young man, I wrote a comic book about dreams and stories called Sandman (collected, and still in print, in ten graphic novels, and you should read it if you haven’t). I got a similar question all the time, back then: “You live in England. How can you set so much of this story in America?”

And I would point out that, in media terms, the U.K. was practically the fifty-first state. We get American films, watch American TV. “I might not write a Seattle that would satisfy an inhabitant,” I used to say, “but I’ll write one as good as a New Yorker who’s never been to Seattle.”

I was, of course, wrong. I didn’t do that at all. What I did instead was, in retrospect, much more interesting: I created an America that was entirely imaginary, in which Sandman could take place. A delirious, unlikely place out beyond the edge of the real.

And that satisfied me until, following my American wife and my desire for an Addams Family–style house, I came to live in America.

Slowly—and it took a while—I realized both that the America I’d been writing was wholly fictional, and that the real America, the one underneath the what-you-see-is-what-you-get surface, was much more interesting than the fictions.

The immigrant experience is, I suspect, a universal one (even if you are the kind if immigrant, like me, who holds on tightly, almost superstitiously, to his U.K. citizenship, long after his accent has become rather dodgy). On the one hand, there’s you, and on the other hand, there’s America. It’s bigger than you are. So you try and make sense of it. You try to figure it out—something which it resists. It’s big enough, and contains enough contradictions, that it is perfectly happy not to be figured out, and somewhere in there you realize that the very best you can hope for is to be like one of the blind men in the fable who each grasped an elephant by its trunk, its leg, its side, its tail, and who each decided that an elephant was like a snake, a tree, a wall, a rope. As a writer all I could do was to describe a small part of the whole.

And it was too big to see.