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.
I didn’t really know what kind of book I wanted to write until, in the summer of 1998, I found myself spending forty-eight hours in Reykjavík, in Iceland, and in the middle of that stay I knew what my next book was. A bunch of fragments of plot, an unwieldy assortment of characters, and something faintly resembling a structure came together in my head. Maybe it was because I was far enough away from America to see it clearly, maybe it was just that its time had come. It would be a thriller, and a murder mystery, and a romance, and a road trip. It would be about the immigrant experience, about what people believed in when they came to America. And about what happened to the things that they believed. I’m English. I like being English. I’ve kept my passport. I’ve as much of my accent as I could. And I’d lived in the U.S. for almost nine years. Long enough to know that everything I’d learned about it from the movies was wrong.
I wanted to write about myths. I wanted to write about America as a mythic place.
I went back to my hotel room and wrote a three-page-long rough outline—more of a loose description of the book I had in my head. I tried calling it Magic America (after the Blur song), and that didn’t seem right. I tried calling it King of America (after the Elvis Costello album) and that didn’t seem right either. So I wrote American Gods (not after anything) at the top of the first page of the outline, and figured I’d come up with a better title sooner or later.
I’d not started writing the novel by the time the publisher sent me the cover. It showed a road and a lightning bolt and, in large letters, a title: American Gods. There seemed no point in fighting it—to be honest, I was starting to like it—and I started to write.
It’s a big book, but then America’s a big country, and trying to fit it into a book was hard enough.
American Gods is the story of a man called Shadow, and the job he is offered when he gets out of prison. It is the story of a road trip. It tells the story of a small Midwestern town, and the disappearances that occur there every winter. I discovered, as I wrote it, why roadside attractions are the most sacred places in America. I learned a lot about gods, and about secret organizations, and wars. I discovered many other strange byways and moments. Some of them delighted me. A few scared me. Some of them amazed me.
When it was almost done, when all that remained was to pull together all the diverse strands, I left the country again, holed up in a huge, cold, old house in Ireland, and typed all that was left to type, shivering, beside a peat fire.
And then the book was done, and I stopped. Looking back on it, it wasn’t really that I’d dared, rather that I had no choice.
This is an expanded version of the essay written for the Borders website in March 2001, and which appears on www.neilgaiman.com.