“American Gods” by Neil Gaiman

I so want to like fantasy. I want to be a member of the Game of Thrones club, though the thought of watching an episode leaves me flat. I wanted to celebrate women’s power in Wonder Woman, but I spaced out after the first five minutes and regretted wasting the time. I want to suspend belief and inhabit worlds and see beyond the fabricated fronts of characters who seem bigger or badder than life, but I simply find them unbelievable. 

I’m nothing if not persistent, so I just tried, yet again. AMERICAN GODS, chosen by my book club, was hailed as “one of the most talked-about books of the new millennium. AMERICAN GODS is a kaleidoscopic journey deep into myth and across an American landscape at once eerily familiar and utterly alien. It is, quite simply, a contemporary masterpiece.”

I did fine at first. I liked Shadow, the main character. Fresh out of prison and stunned by the death of his wife, he is depicted in a real enough way that I cared about him and wanted to follow his journey. Neil Gaiman’s writing is very strong, and that, for awhile, kept me reading and engaged.

But my interest waned about halfway through the book. After meeting mysterious stranger Mr. Wednesday, Shadow’s journey turns out to be a succession of encounters with various supernatural figures and gods, arrivals to America throughout history from all over the world. The characters were not well developed enough to keep me engaged, and I found the conflict, supposedly a battle for the soul of America, sketchy and weak. It was as if Gaiman wrote a ton of creative, descriptive scenes, put them in a hat, and then pulled them out and used them, in no particular order, to form his story.

I stopped reading AMERICAN GODS about two thirds of the way through. I closed the book feeling, not critical, exactly, more curious as to what makes me unable to enjoy a novel which a jillion other people find masterful. I talked with my book club about it. Some members liked researching the gods Gaiman writes about. Others were “taken” enough with the story to finish it. One woman said, “It has no depth.” Everybody thought it was too long.

If you read AMERICAN GODS, I’d love to hear your take on it. But I’m giving up on fantasy. I promise.