Silk Spun

HERE THERE ARE MANY SPOILERS, BOTH SPECIFIC AND VAGUE

I imagine that whenever someone reads “American Gods” for the first time, Neil Gaiman sits back and cackles happily to himself. I certainly would, if I were him. Because this is a book filled with brain explosions and shocked gasps and head-scratching confusion and every single time you think you’ve figured something out, it turns out to be the opposite, or not quite the opposite but some bizarre mutation of what you thought that puts everything into an entirely new light. His ability to do this is fascinating to me; I sit in awed respect of the way his dark twisty mind must work.

I tried to read this book sometime last year, made it about a third of the way through, then gave up. I have no idea why I had such difficulty with it, because even then I really did enjoy what I was reading. It’s just so hard for me to remain focused on the level that focus is required to keep up, and I was irritated by the constant feeling that I understood nothing. This is not a light book, and probably not one that should be undertaken without at least a passing acquaintance with mythology beyond the Greek that everyone knows. I love mythology almost as much as I love faerie tales and tons of the references still went over my head, or went unnoticed entirely.

But all this is to say, I guess I was ready for it this time in a way I wasn’t before because I loved it. I am not quite ready to list it as a favorite, although as we all know, Neil Gaiman is the ultimate favorite among all favorites for me, but it was such a rich, satisfying reading experience. Few books feel so finished at the end, the kind of finished that leaves you with a sigh of contentment and makes you feel like all your important questions have been answered, and answered well. It is clear to me that Neil Gaiman wrote this book lovingly, which is something I get from all his books, and that is just a wonderful thing to see. So, okay, a plot summary, taken from Amazon.

The storm was coming….

Shadow spent three years in prison, keeping his head down, doing his time. All he wanted was to get back to the loving arms of his wife and to stay out of trouble for the rest of his life. But days before his scheduled release, he learns that his wife has been killed in an accident, and his world becomes a colder place.

On the plane ride home to the funeral, Shadow meets a grizzled man who calls himself Mr. Wednesday. A self-styled grifter and rogue, Wednesday offers Shadow a job. And Shadow, a man with nothing to lose, accepts.

But working for the enigmatic Wednesday is not without its price, and Shadow soon learns that his role in Wednesday’s schemes will be far more dangerous than he ever could have imagined. Entangled in a world of secrets, he embarks on a wild road trip and encounters, among others, the murderous Czernobog, the impish Mr. Nancy, and the beautiful Easter — all of whom seem to know more about Shadow than he himself does.

Shadow will learn that the past does not die, that everyone, including his late wife, had secrets, and that the stakes are higher than anyone could have imagined.

All around them a storm of epic proportions threatens to break. Soon Shadow and Wednesday will be swept up into a conflict as old as humanity itself. For beneath the placid surface of everyday life a war is being fought — and the prize is the very soul of America.

As unsettling as it is exhilarating, American Gods is a dark and kaleidoscopic journey deep into myth and across an America at once eerily familiar and utterly alien. Magnificently told, this work of literary magic will haunt the reader far beyond the final page.

It is such a long, sprawling story, I really don’t know how to organize my thoughts into one simple post. Not that any of my posts can really be said to be organized. Or simple. The story was funny:

“Hey,” said Shadow. “Huginn or Muninn, or whoever you are.”

The bird turned, head tipped, suspiciously, on one side, and it stared at him with bright eyes.

“Say ‘Nevermore,’ ” said Shadow.

“Fuck you,” said the raven. It said nothing else as they went through the woodland together.

That evening Shadow sat at the kitchen table trying to figure out how to transform a silver dollar into a penny. It was a trick he had found in Perplexing Parlour Illusions , but the instructions were infuriating, unhelpful and vague. Phrases like “then vanish the penny in the usual way,” occurred every sentence or so. In this context, Shadow wondered, what was “the usual way”? A French drop? Sleeving it? Shouting “Oh my god, look out! A mountain lion!” and dropping the coin into his side pocket while the audience’s attention was diverted?

Mr. Nancy unlocked the hurricane shutters, and pulled open the windows. The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies.

And wise:

“Believe,” said the rumbling voice. “If you are to survive, you must believe.”

“Believe what?” asked Shadow. “What should I believe?”

He stared at Shadow, the buffalo man, and he drew himself up huge, and his eyes filled with fire. He opened his spit-flecked buffalo mouth and it was red inside with the flames that burned inside him, under the earth.

” Everything,” roared the buffalo man.

There was a girl, and her uncle sold her, wrote Mr. Ibis in his perfect copperplate handwriting .

That is the tale; the rest is detail.

There are accounts that, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply.

“So, yeah, my people figured that maybe there’s something at the back of it all, a creator, a great spirit, and so we say thank you to it, because it’s always good to say thank you. But we never built churches. We didn’t need to. The land was the church. The land was the religion. The land was older and wiser than the people who walked on it. It gave us salmon and corn and buffalo and passenger pigeons. It gave us wild rice and walleye. It gave us melon and squash and turkey. And we were the children of the land, just like the porcupine and the skunk and the blue jay.”

And heartbreakingly thought-provoking:

Without individuals we see only numbers: a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, “casualties may rise to a million.” With individual stories, the statistics become people-but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look , see the child’s swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, his skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies’ own myriad squirming children?

We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.

A life that is, like any other, unlike any other.

And filled with wonderful and terrible characters, all deeply flawed and deeply human, even those who are gods. Like Shadow, the gentle giant, the quiet, brooding man thought to be stupid by most, underestimated. He was adorable and lovable and uncertain and kind and loyal and motivated by all the right things, but he made his own mistakes and did his own time for them, and, as his dead wife pointed out to him, went through life neither dead nor really alive. And Laura, his wife, who was tough and resourceful and funny and in love with and the savior of her husband, even while also being the woman who cheated on him while he was in prison, his betrayer, the thing that caused him to go through most of the book numb toward and incurious about the things that happened to him. And also she was dead, which is neither a good nor bad point, just an important fact. And Wednesday, who was creepy and sleazy and irritable and gruff and arrogant and rude and a con man, all the most awful things, but who made me feel a kind of attachment to him and who made me mourn the loss of him and hope for his return, even though he was technically one of the villains in the end. And Hinzelman, who was hilarious and grandfatherly and helpful and told the kind of ridiculous stories you would expect from a small-town old man, but who was really something so, so much worse and who did the darkest of things. And Mr. Nancy, and Sam, who were pretty flawless characters and I have no negative points to mention about them. Especially Sam. She was brilliant, and reminded me a little of Cynthia, the hitchhiker in Stephen King’s “Desperation”.

“My name is Town. My colleague here is Mister Road. We’re investigating the disappearance of two of our associates.”

“What were their names?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Tell me their names. I want to know what they were called. Your associates. Tell me their names and maybe I’ll help you.”

“…Okay. Their names were Mister Stone and Mister Wood. Now, can we ask you some questions?”

“Do you guys just see things and pick names? ‘Oh, you be Mister Sidewalk, he’s Mister Carpet, say hello to Mister Airplane’?”

“This isn’t a movie, Miz Crow.”

“Black Crow. It’s Miz Black Crow. My friends call me Sam.”

“Got it, Sam. Now about this man-”

“But you aren’t my friends. You can call me Miz Black Crow.”

“I never met him.”

“You met him. Please don’t make the mistake of thinking we’re stupid. We aren’t stupid.”

“Mm. I meet a lot of people. Maybe I met him and forgot already.”

“Ma’am, it really is to your advantage to cooperate with us.”

“Otherwise, you’ll have to introduce me to your friends Mister Thumbscrews and Mister Pentothal?”

“Ma’am, you aren’t making this any easier on yourself.”

“Gee. I’m sorry. Now, is there anything else? ‘Cos I’m going to say ‘Buh-bye now’ and close the door and I figure you two are going to go and get into Mister Car and drive away.”

And chapters I loved so much that they almost make me want to declare this book a favorite. Like the time Shadow spent with Ibis and Jacquel at their funeral home–I loved everything from the preparing of the dead to the return of Mad Sweeney, and would only rather not repeat the awkward sex dream with Bast. And the chapter about Shadow and Wednesday visiting Czernobog and the Zorya sisters:

“Well met,” said Czernobog. He shook Shadow’s left hand with his own. His hands were rough and callused, and the tips of his fingers were as yellow as if they had been dipped in iodine.

“How do you do, Mr. Czernobog?”

“I do old. My guts ache, and my back hurts, and I cough my chest apart every morning.”

There is something I just really, really love about old people. Particularly adorably grumpy ones, and that whole chapter felt so sweet and homey (well, except when Czernobog won the right to bash Shadow’s head in with a hammer). And the chapters about Lakeside, where Neil Gaiman displays a startling knowledge of American small towns and the things that make them both irresistibly wonderful and also unbearably claustrophobic. Actually, for someone who (I think) had not lived in america long when this book was written, he managed to pin down so many of the behaviors and traits that make America what it is, both the good and the bad, and showed an intimate familiarity with many aspects of it that make his accounts of Shadow and Wednesday’s road trips so fun and resonant, even if I have not been to the specific places referenced. But, of course, the Lakeside chapters reveal horrifying new layers with the revelation about Hinzelman and the dead children at the end of the book. *flail* So Brilliant. I find myself wanting to reread it already, just to see the clues about Hinzelman’s true nature that I know must be there. It is a testament to Neil Gaiman’s writing skills that, even knowing who they were and what they did, I think of both Wednesday and Hinzelman with fondness.

Layers and hidden clues are a specialty of this book. You could probably read it again and again and discover new surprises each time, uncover new secrets left for you by an author who, I think, respects your intelligence and values you as a reader. It feels like that, like he is probably laughing at you, but it’s a mischievous laugh, not a malicious one, and he is also tipping his hat to you. I keep wanting to use cliches to describe it, like comparing it to the best kind of jigsaw puzzle, or scavenger hunt, or, as Shadow describes:

“The pictures you’d get to color in as kids. ‘Can you see the hidden Indians in this picture? There are ten Indians in this picture, can you find them all?’ And at first glance you could only see the waterfall and the rocks and the trees, then you see that if you just tip the picture on its side that shadow is an Indian…” He yawned.

And, oh, the chapter about Shadow’s vigil for Wednesday. I have so many feelings about that one, but I do not know quite what they are in words. It was beautiful, that Shadow wanted to do it in the first place, that he persisted even as the others tried to give him a way out of it, that even when he realized exactly what he would have to do and what it could cost him, he did not back down. I love Shadow. But more than that, the essence of the act itself was beautiful to me. I don’t know. I am utterly fascinated by religions, all of them, and their rituals and customs, and delirium dreams and the moment when Shadow realized he felt truly alive for possibly the first time and Laura and a squirrel who brought him water in a walnut shell. And how cute is the name Ratatosk for a squirrel? All the love. And then Shadow’s death and the paths he traveled and the final judgment. Terrifying. The very thought of being shown and judged for every single bad thing you have ever done to another person, all those tiny little wrongs you dismiss from your mind because they no longer seem important, how awful that would feel. I made myself very anxious and uncomfortable trying to bring my own wrongs up in my mind. We are so good at forgetting, at downplaying.

And the ‘Coming to America’ bits. They were probably my favorite things of all; I found them all fascinating. I wish a whole book could be made of just them. From the heartbreakingly lonely story of Salim and the ifrit to the tale of what can happen when belief is lacking, I loved everything. My favorite was the life of Essie Tregowan, who, despite a pretty terrible name, was truly a BAMF, albeit of the thieving, con artist type. My favorite in a different way was the story of Wututu and Agasu, separated slave twins, one who led a rebellion and the other who led a much more secretive and beautiful, but ultimately unfulfilling, life. Their story was the point after which I stopped reading the book the first time, and it was the thing I remembered most clearly all the months between then and now. I thought of it from time to time, even though the book itself rarely crossed my mind. I am hesitant to say anything more about it, though, since I have very little knowledge of slavery and obviously no experience with it and so I cannot be certain if Neil Gaiman’s portrayal was accurate and respectful. But I am inclined to believe it was.

There is still so much I have not even begun to touch on. Like how much I loved the way modern gods were portrayed, gods of media and of the Internet, and the way the necessity of belief and worship ran through the book, and the idea that we make the gods, rather than the other way around, and only we can keep them alive. And how television was almost its own entity, allowing the modern gods to communicate with Shadow in pretty disturbing ways (“You ever wanted to see Lucy’s tits?”). And how there were different incarnations of the same god in different places, wherever there were people believing in them, each incarnation different from the others (pretty bitter that I don’t have the tenth anniversary edition where there is a passage about Jesus). And more, and more. But this post is already ridiculous, and probably I am the only one who will ever read it, and I already know my own thoughts. So I will keep the rest to myself, I suppose, or write multiple “American Gods” posts, maybe, sometime. Now I am going to sleep, and tomorrow I will look up some “American gods” references and read about all the things I didn’t understand or just enjoyed enough to want to research more fully.