What I wondered is, if gods and folk heroes are walking among us incarnate because people believe in them, why isn’t Jesus? Or Yahweh?
I don’t have the book in front of me, but IIRC, there’s at least one hint that Jesus is walking around. He wouldn’t be involved with the old gods in the book because he’s not fighting the same battle. The new world is his territory and he’s not struggling from a devastating lack of belief or power.
Shadow asks about him, and Wednesday says something like “That lucky son-of-a-virgin? He could fall in a cesspool and come out smelling like roses.”.
Good lord, yes. I remain perplexed at the gush this book gets. Interesting ideas, but that’s about it.
American Gods has a subtle but strong underpinning. If the story wasn’t enough to carry you along, tastes vary, but it’s not badly written - I enjoyed it very much for the constant references and characterization, finding it full of surprises and cool stuff. I have to admit I didn’t think it was going anywhere the first time I read it when I was about halfway through, but it did.
And the lead character is a bit of a passive personality, the quiet tough guy who lets things happen - he has very little initiative to start or plan things. His heroism is more of the endurance and tenacity sort.
I very much like this kind of mythic story though, and am inclined to give it leeway. A similar one is Zeitgeist by Bruce Sterling. Perhaps the Dirk Gently novel “Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul” by Douglas Adams is also along the same lines. But even though I’d have given American Gods some room if I found it less than stellar - that wasn’t the case. By the end, it all felt coherent and meaningful as a single broad story.
Have to agree though that Anansi Boys is - more of a piece in some ways, and easier reading in others. But Anansi Boys reuses a really similar plot structure and character archetypes from Neverwhere. So, seeing the repetition there in the author’s works, I found Anansi Boys less impressive than American Gods, though more engaging and upbeat.
Maybe that’s not fair since I suppose I could stretch it and imagine that American Gods gets some of its narrative structure from the Sandman series. I can see it that way. But that’s a bigger, less tractable story and with less direct comparison as well. So I’m not going to call my above conclusion unfair after all 
I don’t think he even addresses the Greek pantheon, does he? You’d think that Zeus and Co. would be one helluva force in this world.
Zeus is probably doing well enough that he doesn’t feel the need to rock the boat. Yeah, nobody really takes him seriously any more, but almost everyone takes him half-seriously. Likewise Thor, who is conspicuously absent beside his father and brother.
As for the minor Greek mythological figures, like the satyrs or naiads, they probably never had the chance to come to America, since those who believed in them were gone long before the discovery of the New World.
I was about to suggest that the “old gods” present in America reflect the ethnic makeup of the US – primarily British, Germanic/Scandinavian, and African, with some Eastern European and Semitic – so since there aren’t that many people of Greek descent in the US there wouldn’t be much belief in the Greek pantheon even in the “they were the old gods of my people” sense. While the Greek pantheon is well-known to non-Greeks, they’re basically just literary figures to everyone but neo-Pagans.
However, this fails to explain the presence of Egyptian gods in the US. It also occurs to me that there are plenty of Italian-Americans, and while the vast majority of Italian immigrants have been Christians the Roman pantheon would at least fall under “the old gods of my people” for them.
A really nitpicky problem I had with the book: in one scene it’s revealed (Very Minor Spoiler) that Cairo, Illinois, which was officially named so in the 19th century, was actually founded by ancient Egyptians and the people in the 19th century renamed it Cairo at the “suggestion” of people already there.
The problem is that Cairo, Egypt isn’t an ancient city. It’s medieval. (Perhaps the name Cairo had meaning before the Muslim era, but it wasn’t the name of a major city.)
I have a recent reprint of the book and there’s a carpenter that turns up when Shadow’s
On the tree.
I think it was added as a bonus chapter.
Thor is mentioned as having killed himself, IIRC.
Well, according to Wednesday, anyway, but I’m inclined not to take his word on anything. Besides, Thor can’t have really, for-good, died: He’s still way too well-known for that. Even if he did kill himself, he’ll get better.
I always took the presence of the various gods as being indicative of their worship practices still being followed, even if unintentionally or under the guise of something else.
For example, Eostre has a fairly sizeable role, and nobody I know of actually worships her directly, but her role in the book was because of the Easter celebrations about the Easter Bunny, eggs, etc…
Maybe there are some ancient Egyptian legacy practices that are either common to every day life, or that were common in Egyptian immigrant culture?
He doesn’t address it directly, but there never were real worshipers of the Greek or Roman pantheons in America. By the time the Greeks and Italians made it over here, they were primarily Christians. They may well exist but the lack of any real belief would make them weak.
The key scene that really explains why the title is American Gods is at the end when Shadow comes across Odin in Iceland. And that Odin is more of the traditional Norse one and unique from Wednesday. Belief gives the gods not just their existence but also their form. Wednesday is an American style huckster while Iceland-Odin is closer to the old Norse god and not really lacking in power as Wednesday was. That’s also why there’s probably a powerful version of Zeus et al in Greece but not in America.
Also, it doesn’t get explicitly stated in the novel (though it does in the follow up novella “Monarch of the Glen”) but Shadow is America’s version of Baldur.
If I may ask two more questions (I promise I’ll either the book or shut up)
If it’s simply believing in a fictional character, then why aren’t there all kinds of random belief-people roaming about, from the Easter Bunny to Santa to Cthuhlu? This kinda sounds like the logical issues which kept coming up with the In Nomine RPG, where the Ethereal creatures never made much sense and frequently contradicted the rules. (For example, logically Ash Ketchum should be monsterously powerful as he’s getting a lot more consistent support than Odin ever did, etc. Mario is probably a demigod astride the Earth, and many figures form classical myth are still relevant simply because their stories are told and retold with each generation to many more people.)
Second, wouldn’t a lot of this imply that the gods could be a lot more useful and successful if they weren’t complete losers? And/or it’s the American mind which makes them losers? I’d also wonder why obscure pagan deities like Eostre (who may not even have existed and whose connection to Easter is thin at best) made over to the New World, likewise with the other pagan gods. Do they just need a tiny handful of worshippers to become real?
They aren’t fictional exactly; they’re somehow created out of a je ne sais quoi “god stuff”- some kind of focal point that through veneration and sacrifice gets created and then is around forever (like the old man who began as a child who was sacrificed and worshiped and keeps alive and powerful through the sacrifices of the ice cars
Apparently the computer and internet new gods are there because of the worshipful feelings some have for them. (Porn must really be a powerful entity too.)
Unexplained and a bit of a plot hole. Czernobog (?) mentions that he once had a tiny cult, but he’s mostly forgotten now and has to work in the stockyards, where somehow nobody notices he doesn’t age [even though he’s old]. His sisters, however- one of them anyway- seem to be more powerful than Odin, who presumably is the more worshipped. (I think Odin came over with the Vikings and was kept alive through miscellaneous worship by immigrants and holy sites.)
Truthfully, a lot is never really explained and there are major questions, which to me is a weakness of the book and why, to me, it’s a brilliant concept that never becomes a brilliant novel.
Like I said above, I always got the impression that folk beliefs and customs brought the gods over and kept them alive in a severely weakened state. For example, the eating of a ham during the Yule season was supposedly originally a tribute to Freyr, but now a lot of people eat them at Christmas for no particular reason they’re aware of, except that you eat ham or turkey at Christmas. So you have some indirect Freyr worship there, but not so strong as if someone stood up and sacrificed a sow to Freyr and ate it in his name.
That’s how I understood the indirect importation of many of the old gods and why some of the old gods are so weak. Others were obviously imported directly via actual worshippers.
The only way this has to do with this thread is that it’s Neil Gaiman reading his own work, and it’s a Lovecraftian short story, but for what it’s worth, here’s the delightful short story, “Shoggoth’s Old Peculiar.”
Not as far as I know. I can’t think of any common American superstitions, holidays, or words that are derived from Ancient Egyptian mythology, and even in Egypt the old religion had been mostly replaced by Christianity more than a thousand years before the colonization of the New World. (Christianity was in turn largely replaced by Islam, although there is still a significant Christian minority in Egypt.)
While the Greek and Roman gods have been treated mostly as literary symbols for centuries, modern Americans do at least use their names (or words derived from their names) on a regular basis, which is more reverence than we typically show to the Egyptian gods.