Review: American Gods

I finished Neil Gaiman’s American Gods at about 1:30 this morning. I adore “page turners” like this, though I have to say this is the most singular “page turner” I’ve ever encountered.

As readers of this blog will probably know, all meaning is context bound, and contexts are endless. Here’s mine:

When this book was originally released I was writing (or had just written) my own book (which touched on the commonalities between the multiplicities of religious expression) and was deeply immersed in my continuing studies on the evolution of consciousness. I was reading Ken Wilber and Georg Hegel and researching Foucault simply because he touched off so many firestorms — and shifting my professional practice to mentoring, and teaching meditation. In short, I wasn’t reading a lot of modern fiction at that time simply because there weren’t enough hours in the day.

So… it’s 6 years later and I’m reading a work of (semi)modern fiction and delighted to see Neil Gaiman tell a riveting story about the evolution of human consciousness and what happens to the objects of our collective beliefs when we outgrow them. He also demonstrates the evolution of consciousness in a personal sense, I think, because he is telling such a multi-layered story, and you access it at the level(s) that are meaningful for you. As an author, he can only convincingly relate the depths he’s experienced, but as a reader, you can hook into it anywhere and probably enjoy it a great deal. True craft, that.

What I found so singular about it is the pacing, especially a novel meant for a modern audience. Over 500 pages to tell a tale that could possibly have been told in 300 — but it just didn’t matter. The main character was, well, evolving and evolution is of necessity a slow and messy process. Even when I found myself wondering if he was ever going to move the plot along, it wasn’t in frustration or resentment — his craft as a storyteller is such that I was actually intrigued with page after page of background, exposition, or introspection, even when the information was repeated.

I find my patience for the repetitiveness personally amusing — I’d thought that, between Wilber and Foucault, patience had got burned out a long time ago.

I know you’ve all probably read this already and I’m just late to the Gaiman game (Neverwhere is next on my list). I just wanted to share my perspective on the book here, since I’d recommend it to just about anyone. It’s implications for your life are as boundless as the contexts we all bring to them.