I’m intrigued, if not entirely convinced, by some of the arguments Erik Kain explores here about whether fantasy is an inherently Christian genre. He quotes D.G. Meyers on C.S. Lewis, who writes that:

Lewis said in a 1947 essay that “To construct plausible and moving ‘other worlds’ you must draw upon the only real ‘other world’ we know, that of the spirit.” No statement about the genre has ever been more definitive. The bedrock premise of fantasy, which cannot be waived without voiding the genre, is the existence of a spirit realm. Lewis’s Narnia, Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Rowling’s “wizarding world,” parallel universes of all kind are imaginative reconstructions of Christianity’s first principle: namely, that the “kingdom of heaven” is the only true world.

I’m not sure I agree with the premise that fantasy depends on the idea of another world. Certainly there’s some fantasy that depends on escaping entirely to a parallel universe, whether it’s accessible at the back of a wardrobe or through a competitive, Ivy League-style entrance exams process. But another world is hardly a Christian concept: Islam has highly developed and debated visions of limbo, judgment, hell, and heaven.

And there’s also fantasy based on the idea that we simply don’t know everything about the world that we live in, that there is power that we can access here and now if we know where to look for it and are determined enough to exercise it, all of which give us plenty of hooks in Jewish and Islamic tradition. In the former, take the legend of the golem, the idea that by very hard work and access to esoteric knowledge, rabbis were able to summon protectors for the Jewish people from the earth. There’s also a strong tradition of Jewish mysticism and Messianism, which suggests a permeable boundary between realms and regimes. Judaism has a demonic tradition that includes creatures like Dubbyks and Mazikeen, just as Islam has Jinns, Ifrits, and angels. Christians aren’t the only ones to have fairy realms or ghosts. And in Judaism, the Reconstructionist drive toward human transcendence and elimination of oppression is a framework for an epic quest that can take place in the here and now.

I think the point is more that, as a modification of how Erik puts it, that the fantasy that we see on the American market is “not founded in Christian themes so much as it is rooted in distinctly Anglo-Saxon mythology. And not just the mythology of the Medieval, feudalistic period, but the pre-Christian myths of the faerie-folk as well.” That we see certain things on the market doesn’t mean that fantasy is limited to those things, or inherently grows out to those things. It just means that we’re reliant on old patterns. I don’t think Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is perfect, but it is a rich illustration of the possibilities of Egyptian gods of death, of pre-Christian totem spirits, of Ifrits on the streets of New York for fantasy even if it doesn’t fulfill all of that promise itself.

The post contains spoilers for Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. Voting for the next book club will begin on Monday.

I don’t think it comes as a surprise to anyone who’s read along with this book club so far that I don’t think this is a terribly successful novel. Gaiman tells far more frequently than he shows, doesn’t do nearly as much as he could with an utterly fascinating concept, and relies heavily on a twist ending that, while obvious, still leaches some of the pleasure from the journey and absolves him of actually having to resolve the conflict that he’s set up, because surprise, it doesn’t matter! That said, I think some of the best things in the novel happen in these final sections.

First, is the idea we’ve been waiting for all along: gods don’t survive well in America because America is itself a deity, and the rise of fall of gods in America is itself a sacrifice to the land that Whiskey Jack explains to Shadow after his vigil for Mr. Wednesday and his trip through the underworld, which as trips through the underworld go is a real snoozefest. That stuff should wrench, man. As Jack puts it:

I’m a culture hero. We do the same shit gods do we just screw up more and nobody worships us. They tell stories about us, but they tell the ones that make us look bad along with the ones where we came out fairly okay…This is not a good country for gods. My people figured that out early on. There are creator spirits who found the arth or made it or shit it out, but you think about it: who’s going to worship Coyote? He made love to Porcupine Woman and got his dick shot through with more needles than a pincushion. He’d argue with rocks and the rocks would win. 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.

Read more

This post contains spoilers through the first 16 chapters of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. If you want to spoil beyond that, feel free, just label your comment as such. For next week, let’s finish the novel.

So, what is it with America? We’ve heard repeatedly that America’s a land without gods of its own. But now that we’ve got an explanation for that, the story of how the first people, and the first God, came to America over the land bridge of the Bering Straight, the Gods we’ve gotten to know over the course of the novel are telling us something else. “This is not a country that tolerates gods for long,” Mr. Nancy tells Shadow at the center of America. And Czernbog explains that America’s infused with a kind of negative religious energy, “places where they can build no temples. Places where people will not come, and will leave as soon as they can. Places where gods can only walk if they are forced to…All of America has it, a little. That is why we are not welcome here. But the center. The center is the worst. Is like a minefield. We all tread too carefully there to dare break the truce.”

There’s some real pathos here, in the accident that led to the forgetting of Nunyununni, the God who first lead humans to America, and who pledged it to her people for seven times seven generations, in Czernbog’s aging. Even Gods don’t see all the truth for all their lives — there are some things that come to them only with age, and in the final moments. “I dreamed a strange dream,” Czernbog tells Shadow. “I dreamed that I am truly Bielbog. That forever the world imagines that there are two of us, the light god and the dark, but now that we are both old, I find it was only me all the time, giving them gifts, taking my gifts away.” And Wednesday’s complaint that “If you move and act in the material world, then the material world acts on you. Pain hurts, just as greed intoxicates and lust burns. We may not die easy and we sure as hell don’t die well, but we can die. If we’re still loved and remembered, something a whole lot like us comes along and takes our place and the whole damn thing starts all over again. And if we’re forgotten, we’re done,” shows how agonizing it can be to be a God.

But even though those moments are rewarding, I’m getting tired of the endless assertions about the way America interacts with the divine. I want to know why America is the way it is, and “humans weren’t here initially” doesn’t really do it: humanity started small and spread out and filled up the world with people and with belief. Gaiman doesn’t appear to have an explanation, which strikes me as a problem for a book that’s ostensibly about American memory, and sacredness, and capacity for belief. I don’t like Sam Black Crow’s statement of principals as much as I like Crash Davis’ in Bull Durham:

But it’s still pretty good:

I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis…I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass…I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste…I believe that the great poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Dom Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe candy really did taste better when I was a kid…I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive.

And if that much capacity for faith and wonder exists in just one American, if people who have lived as humans for their entire lives will sacrifice themselves to honor you without knowing who they are or what they do, it’s hard to see why this is such a terrible land to be a god in, even if you don’t last forever. Shadow’s vigil is the section of the novel that gets closest to a sense of what the divine is, but I also think it’s one that isn’t actually specific to faith and the divine in America. Maybe the point is that faith is universal, trans-American. But then why are we concerned with American Gods? If this is a story about American exceptionalism, we have to have some sense of what’s exceptional about America.

This post contains spoilers through the first 12 chapters of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. If you want to spoil beyond that, feel free, just label your comment as such. For next week, let’s read through chapter 16.

One thing that I struggle with in American Gods is that this is a story about mysteries that always seems to stop short of really expressing the strangeness and power of worshiping and being worshiped, of sacrifice and sacrificing and being sacrificed to. When Mr. Wednesday and Shadow visit Las Vegas, Gaiman tells us that “The secret is this: people gamble to lose money. They come to the casinos for the moment in which they feel alive, to ride the spinning wheel and turn the cards and lose themselves, with the coins, in the slots. They may brag about the nights they won, the money they took from the casino, but they treasure, secretly treasure, the times they lost. It’s a sacrifice, of sorts.” The space between what people say they believe, and what they actually believe, is interesting, but Gaiman doesn’t really explain why that space exists, or what people get out of making that kind of sacrifice and treating its holiness as a kind of secret.

Similarly, we don’t really know what the entity at the heart of the casino gets out of that loss, those sacrifices. Wednesday promises him a drink that he describes to Shadow as “like bees and honey. Each bee makes only a tiny, tiny drop of honey. It takes thousands of them, millions perhaps, all working together to make the pot of honey you have on your breakfast table. Now imagine that you could eat nothing but honey. That’s what it’s like for my kind of people…we feed on belief, on prayers, on love.” It’s an OK metaphor, but not a sufficient one to really convey what it would be like to receive those small offerings on a regular basis. And while honey’s wonderful, it’s not the same as existence. The magnitude of the metaphor doesn’t match Wednesday’s petulance, which I think is one of the nicest moments in the novel at showing what happens to diminished deities: “What the hell else can I do? They don’t sacrifice rams or bulls to me,” Wednesday complains after Shadow objects to him shortchanging a waitress in San Francisco. “They don’t send me the souls of killers and slaves, gallows-hung and raven-picked. They made me. They forgot me. Now I take a little back from them. Isn’t that fair?”
Read more

This post contains spoilers through the first nine chapters of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. If you want to spoil beyond that, feel free, just label your comment as such. For next week, let’s read through chapter 12.

This section’s a beautiful explication of the idea of America, but reading through Mr. Wednesday’s speech to the Gods, it struck me that there’s part of Gaiman’s set-up of this universe that doesn’t quite make sense:

When the people came to America they brought us with them. They brought me, and Loki and Thor, Anansi and the Lion-God, Leprechauns and Kobols and Banchsees, Kubera, and Frau Holle and Ashtaroth, and they brought you. We rode here in their minds, and we took root. We traveled with the settlers to the new lands across the ocean. The land is vast. Soon enough, our people abandoned us, remembered us only as creatures of the old land, as things that had not come with them to the new. Our true believers passed on, or stopped believing, and we were left, lost and scared and dispossessed, only what little smidgens of worship or belief we could find. And to get by as best we could. So that’s what we’ve done, gotten by, out on the edges of things, where no one was watching us too closely. We have, let us face it and admit it, little influence. We prey on them, and we take from them, and we get by; we strip and we whore and we drink too much; we pump gas and we steal and we cheat and we exist in the cracks at the edges of society. Old gods, here in this new land without gods.

Read more

This post contains spoilers through the first four chapters of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. If you want to spoil beyond that, feel free, just label your comment as such. For next week, let’s read through the end of Part I (up to, but not beyond, chapter 9. I should note, by the way, that I’m reading the original rather than the re-released author’s preferred text.

One of the things I love about American Gods, and that I think is true of the best of Neil Gaiman’s work, is the way he establishes the human tendency towards myth, and the Gods’ tendencies towards mundanity. And while American Gods is not precisely a social problem novel, I appreciate that he starts laying that groundwork in a story about prison culture and the way it makes it harder for ex-cons to re-acclimate:

The upshot of it all was that Johnnie Larch never actually made it to Seattle, and he spent the next couple of days in town in bars, and when his one hundred dollars was gone he held up a gas station with a toy gun for money to keep drinking, and the police finally picked him up for pissing in the street. Pretty soon he was back inside serving the rest of his sentence and a little extra for the gas station job. And the moral of this story, according to Johnnie Larch, was this: don’t piss off people who work in airports.

‘Are you sure it’s not something like ‘The kind of behavior that works in a specialized environment, such as prison, can fail to work and in fact ecome harmful when used outside such an environment’?” said Shadow, when Johnnie Larch told him the story.

But even though we have a tendency to make myths out of our lives, that doesn’t mean we can accept the extraordinary. What lets Bilquis get away with her seductions is the fact that her clients can’t believe what’s happening to them. And Mr. Wednesday’s pose as a two-bit con artist not only lets him support himself, but it disguises his extraordinariness. Gods don’t turn tricks or scams, because why would they? In the world of American Gods, Americans can’t quite conceive of the Gods as small, but that doesn’t mean they can appreciate them in all their profound strangeness and power either, as Shadow begins to find out in a series of disturbing dreams:
Read more

Since we’re going to be reading a book about some of the ways faith is lived in America (and how that affects how deities spend their time on the continent), I thought it was worthwhile to pull in some actual facts on the state of American religion. So I called on my long-time friend and resident theologian Chris Ashley, a Ph.D. student at Union Theological Seminary who works on, among other things, the relationship of gay people to evangelical faith, and who is particularly qualified to comment on this particular subject because he carried Neil Gaiman’s luggage at one of the book signings on the American Gods tour. Denominationally, we differ on our preferences in monotheism, and our baseball teams (he is a benighted Cubs fan), but he’s a great guy (some of you have met him in comments) and I’m grateful to him for pulling this together.

By Chris Ashley

The premise of American Gods is plausible because everybody knows Americans are highly religious, especially when we’re compared to the world’s other wealthy and powerful nations. But how religious are we, exactly, and how is that landscape changing?

Americans overwhelmingly identify with some form or descendant of Christianity. As of 2007, the figure was about 79 percent. (All numbers, unless otherwise cited, are from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s Religious Landscape Survey.) Within Christianity, the three largest subgroups are evangelical Protestants (e.g. Southern Baptists, Pentecostals), Roman Catholics, and “mainline” Protestants (e.g. Methodists, Lutherans). Evangelicals are just over a quarter of the population, Catholics just under, and the mainline just under a fifth.

After Christians, the single largest religious group, and the fastest-growing one, is the unaffiliated, at just over 16 percent. This statistical construct includes avowed atheists and agnostics, as well as those who simply have no identification. The latter, some 12 percent of the United States as a whole, is larger than any single denomination other than the Catholics. There are approximately as many self-identified atheists as Jews or Mormons (1.6 percent for atheists; 1.7 percent for the others). The unaffiliated are a more exact cross-section of America than any other religious group, matching income and ethic proportions of the population as a whole very closely. Among other major world religions, there are about as many Buddhists as Muslims and slightly fewer Hindus (0.7 percent, 0.6 percent, 0.4 percent).
Read more

It was a slow starter, but Neil Gaiman’s American Gods emerged as the clear winner in our book club election. Let’s read through the first four chapters for next Friday and kick off discussion then.

Because we had so many nominations in this round, what I’m going to do in future rounds is take these nominations, knock off any book that got less than 10 votes, and we’ll pick from what’s left.

For folks fretting about whether HBO’s actually going to roll with a full seven seasons of Game of Thrones, I think you can probably relax. Over the weekend, The Hollywood Reporter broke the news that the network apparently has signed up Tom Hanks’ Playtone to do six seasons of its planned adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods, each at 10 to 12 episodes. Obviously, things could fall apart, and I’m not sure what the very sizable order will mean for how the story changes from page to screen: will they be lingering in the narrative? Throwing Anansi Boys in the mix, too? But the fact that the initial plan is for six seasons suggests huge hopes and huge ambitions — as well as sizable cojones — at HBO. And given that American Gods is a single novel, if the network’s willing to blow it out to 60-plus episodes of television, I imagine they’re ready to go the distance with the existing material of Game of Thrones.

I’m utterly fascinated by HBO’s decision that fantasy is the place for them to take a stand. I love it, of course. Even more than conquering the box office, the premium cable channel to end all premium cable channel’s decision to embrace genre fiction is a major mark of validation. But it also strikes me as a risky one. HBO has always relied on good reviews, on Emmys, on the sense that it’s doing something profoundly different and better than other networks, to get audiences to pony up the subscription fees that let them turn out highly unusual programming. The high priesthood of criticism hasn’t uniformly accepted fantasy as a serious genre, whether it’s Ginia Bellafante’s headache-inducing dismissal of Game of Thrones as a dudely fantasy, or the fact that (though the magazine did do a feature on the long-awaited A Dance With Dragons) the New Yorker has yet to review the show. By contrast, Nancy Franklin got to John From Cincinnati just two weeks after the show premiered in 2007. True Blood‘s always intentionally been treated as if it’s been froth, which is probably due in part to its origins in Charlaine Harris’s paranormal romances as well as in its embrace of its status as high-concept, good-looking, violent candy.

The Wire and The Sopranos were easy shows for critics to embrace, if only because they were morally challenging variations on familiar forms: the Dickensian social novel and the tragic American family novel. Championing them was a way to show your sophistication, as well as the quality of your education. That’s not to say that Game of Thrones hasn’t been reviewed, and reviewed very, very well, just that it hasn’t conquered everyone’s hearts yet, and I think part of that has to do with its genre. And certainly fandom has a critic-proof power.

Neil Gaiman has much more mainstream cred than George R. R. Martin does; to a certain extent, he has transcended the label of fantasy. And it may be that if American Gods succeeds, it’ll end up casting a backwards glow on Game of Thrones. But HBO has long relied on critical acclaim to attract audiences to shows they might otherwise find baffling or unattractive. It’ll be interesting to see what the long-term impact of the network’s investment is on where fantasy fits in the pantheon.