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AMERICAN GODS By Neil Gaiman M ...
AMERICAN GODS
By Neil Gaiman
Morrow. 465 pp. $26
At least since sailors of late antiquity heard a voice crying "The Great Pan is
dead!," writers have wondered about the fate of the gods. Did Zeus and the Roman
Pantheon and the children of Odin simply vanish? Did all those folkloric satyrs
, imps and kobolds, those leprechauns, nymphs and little people just evaporate,
like dew in the sunlight of reason? Or might they, in fact, still be among us, u
nrecognized, somewhat diminished in power, but nonetheless here?
This is, in large part, the premise of American Gods. Neil Gaiman -- acclaimed f
or his Sandman graphic novels and for the comic Good Omens (co-authored with Ter
ry Pratchett) -- imagines that all the immigrants who've ever come to America br
ought their gods along too. But over time the old-world beliefs faded, and the v
italizing sacrifices to the ancient deities were abandoned. Without worshipers,
these erstwhile lords of Nature drifted aimlessly around the country. A few, lik
e Thor, committed suicide. Others took up professions vaguely associated with th
eir traditional attributes. So a goddess of love, such as the Middle Eastern Bil
quis, turns tricks in Hollywood. Anansi the Spider changes into Mr. Nancy, a cou
rtly old black man with a knack for clever stories. An Arabic ifrit, or jinni, w
hirls through Manhattan as a cab driver. Ibis and Anubis -- Egyptian gods of the
dead -- naturally become morticians. An Irish folk legend, Mad Sweeney, shuffle
s through the streets as a homeless wino in a dirty T-shirt.
Yet even as some deities grow rickety and neglected, new ones spring into lusty
maturity -- our modern gods of the stock market, the media, the Internet, the cr
edit card and shopping mall and cell phone. Every day these gain in strength and
ambition. And increasingly the two opposing belief systems clash. Though these
strutting new gods may be haughty and powerful, the old ones are clever and desp
erate. Rather than allow his kind to disappear into oblivion, their leader, Odin
, chooses bold action. He will round up his supernatural cronies and rivals; tog
ether they will gird themselves for a great final battle against the forces of t
he modern world. Immortals will perish at this Ragnarok, but the ancient gods ju
st might triumph in the end.
Does all this sound good? It is. Mystery, satire, sex, horror, poetic prose -- A
merican Gods uses all these to keep the reader turning the pages. Its main chara
cter is a likable young guy in his mid-thirties named Shadow, a former physical
trainer from a small Indiana town. In the novel's opening pages, Shadow has just
spent three years in prison and is eager to be released. He can't wait to see h
is wife, Laura. But then a fellow inmate murmurs "Big storm coming. Keep your he
ad down," and Shadow's whole life is altered. On his way home, he keeps bumping
into the bearded, Jack Daniels-drinking Mr. Wednesday, who repeatedly offers him
a job. Eventually, Shadow accepts -- quaffing three glasses of mead to seal the
contract -- and becomes the driver, confidant and bodyguard to this peripatetic
grifter and wheeler-dealer, only gradually learning the truth about his employe
r's identity.
Naturally, with a name like Shadow our hero is himself more than he realizes. Wh
y, for instance, does he have these strange dreams about a buffalo-headed man? I
s it somehow important that he should be so fiercely in love with Laura, or that
he has mastered various coin tricks? How does he manage to survive beatings and
capture by the enemy? Why do cats like him so? And do the characters on televis

ion sitcoms really talk to him? What, finally, is his ultimate purpose in Mr. We
dnesday's shadowy plan?
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As this apocalyptic novel progresses, Gaiman balances several different narrativ
es: Shadow's "on-the-road" adventures, as he and Wednesday crisscross the countr
y stopping at cheesy roadside attractions -- actually nodes of deep supernatural
power -- to recruit various beings for the coming battle; tales of ancient noma
ds, African slaves and Irish immigrants, who in ages past transported their gods
to these shores; and Shadow's peculiar dreams, in which he visits otherworldly
realms and undergoes instruction and rebirth. To keep the story from growing too
grandiose, Gaiman throws in a fair amount of humor: Though Wednesday travels al
l over these United States, he stays off the freeways because "he didn't know wh
ich side the freeways were on." There are also two major subplots: 1) the deathdefying love between Shadow and his lost Laura; and 2) Shadow's interactions wit
h the populace of picture-postcard Lakeside, where he holes up when the Bad Guys
are hot on his trail. As any reader of Richard Matheson or Ursula Le Guin knows
, a village that seems too idyllic must be paying some hellish price for its per
fection.
About two-thirds of the way through American Gods, Shadow tells a young woman th
at she wouldn't believe the things that had happened to him. Oh yeah! She answer
s him with a catalogue aria:
"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true an
d I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe
in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis
and Mister Ed. Listen -- I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge
is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by a
liens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones
who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future
sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffa
lo woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. . . . I believe that ant
ibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day
we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the World
s. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and
Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm. . . . I believe that anyone who cl
aims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. . . . I belie
ve that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens
when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it."
Not everyone cares for fantasy, and some people can't read the genre at all, unl
ess it's labeled magic realism. But if you have enjoyed, say, John Crowley's Lit
tle, Big or Stephen King's The Stand or the urbane horror fiction of Jonathan Ca
rroll, not to mention Gaiman's own Sandman or Frank Miller's Ronin, then America
n Gods arrives just in time for your July or August vacation. There are flaws in
the book -- Shadow's big moment feels anti-climactic, the gods of the media cou
ld use more definition, and the novel is probably too long -- but on the whole t
he story accelerates crisply toward its surprise ending. So watch out this summe
r: Big storm coming. *
Michael Dirda's e-mail address is dirdam@washpost.com. His online discussion of
books takes place each Thursday at 2 p.m. on washingtonpost.com.

washingtonpost.com
In defense of Rudyard Kipling and The Jungle Books
By Michael Dirda
Earlier this summer I was on a panel at a literary conference where I happened t
o say that Rudyard Kipling was a wonderful writer. Immediately, a number of peop
le in the audience began to boo and hiss. Two of my fellow panelists nearly shri
eked that Kipling was utterly beyond the pale, being at once racist, misogynist a
nd imperialist. Not entirely surprised by this reaction, but nonetheless flabber
gasted by its vehemence, I made a flustered attempt to champion the author of Pla
in Tales From the Hills, The Jungle Books and Kim. I declared what many believe, that
he is the greatest short-story writer in English. This only made things worse.
Finally, with some desperation I blurted out: How much Kipling have you actually
read?
A short silence followed, and, without any answer to my question, the discussion
moved on to other, less heated topics. But I felt significantly downcast. So wh
en I got home I sat down and reread The Jungle Books, recently reprinted by Pengui
n because of a new film about Mowgli, the Man-cub reared by wolves. I also dipped
into a number of biographies and critical works, visited the website of the Kipl
ing Society and tried to clarify my own thoughts about, arguably, the most contr
oversial author in English literature.
[A summer book list like no other: Michael Dirda picks 11 hidden gems]
Born in 1865, Rudyard Kipling started writing short sketches while a teenager wo
rking for newspapers in India. By the time he was 23 he had published his advent
ure classic The Man Who Would Be King and the famous ghost story The Phantom Ricksha
w. Moving to London in 1889, this prodigy soon began to flood the marketplace wit
h even greater short-story masterpieces. Outstanding examples include the heartrending account of an Anglo-Indian love affair, Without Benefit of Clergy, and the
harrowing At the End of the Passage, a depiction of mental strain and breakdown on
the Indian frontier that rivals Joseph Conrad in its intensity.

Kipling, however, wasnt content to conquer London with his prose alone. In 1892 Ba
rrack-Room Ballads appeared and soon the world was reciting Danny Deever, Mandalay an
d Gunga Din: Tho Ive belted you an flayed you,/ By the livin Gawd that made you,/ You
a better man than I am, Gunga Din. Contemporary critics noted that Kiplings work h
ad finally given a voice to enlisted soldiers, clerks and ordinary working peopl
e. He was also called vulgar for just that reason. A youthful J.M. Barrie the fu
ture creator of Peter Pan and briefly a rival to Kipling in popularity cast all su
ch aspersions aside: The great question is, can he write? To which my own answer
is that no young man of such capacity has appeared in our literature for years.
By the mid-1890s Kipling was the most famous English writer in the world. Yet ha
ving become a doting father, he then spent much of the next decade on childrens b
ooks, producing the jungle tales of Mowgli, as well as such bedtime favorites as
Rikki-TikkiTavi and the glorious Just So Stories, which Kipling illustrated himself.
In 1901, he brought out Kim, a picaresque boys adventure partly inspired by Huckleb
erry Finn; it sent Henry James into raptures. Half a century later, the eminent N
irad C. Chaudhuri would still call it the finest novel in the English language wi
th an Indian theme. Its most fully imagined characters are conspicuously all nonEnglish and ethnically and religiously diverse: the Irish Catholic hero, the Pat
han horse-dealer Mahbub Ali, an elderly upper-class lady from the North-West pro
vinces, the Bengali spy Hurree Chunder Mookerjee and, not least, a Tibetan lama.
[Blockbuster!: The strange tale of the best-selling crime novel of the 19th centur
y]

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Yet when he published this novel, Kipling s reputation was already on the wane.
As the two Jungle Books show, their author was a proponent of order and discipli
ne, restraint and duty. He believed in what he notoriously called the white mans b
urden, the obligation of the superior West to bring civilization to lesser breeds
without the Law. He defended Britain during the Boer War, became a pal of Cecil R
hodes, and made clear his jingoist reverence for the military virtues. By the ti
me of his death in 1936, Kipling had been out of critical fashion for a quartercentury, even though his later work included magnificent stories that range from
the comic The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat to the immensely moving The Ga
rdener and Dayspring Mishandled, a complex study of artistic revenge and marital tr
eachery. Today, more often than not, Kiplings books serve mainly as quarries in w
hich academics dig out instances of racial insensitivity, colonialist arrogance
and anti-feminist caricature.
But should Kiplings various prejudices, however deplorable, keep us from experien
cing the real and lasting pleasure of his best stories? Defending his own admira
tion for Kipling, Neil Gaiman once said, It would be a poor sort of world if one
were only able to read authors who expressed points of view that one agreed with
entirely. It would be a bland sort of world if we could not spend time with peo
ple who thought differently, and who saw the world from a different place. Kipli
ng was many things that I am not, and I like that in my authors. To which I would
add further that the very point of reading fiction is to see through eyes other
than ones own. In time this leads to an enlargement of perspective and forestall
s any rush to simplistic judgments. The sign of an educated person, its been said
, is the ability to offer assent or dissent in nuanced, graduated terms.
And what of The Jungle Books? It was pure pleasure to revisit them. Still, I suspe
ct many people know only of Mowgli and his foster-parents Mother and Father Wolf
, old Baloo the bear, Bagheera the black panther and the mighty python Kaa throu
gh their jejune film representations. A pity. These stories, by turns thrilling,
humorous and touching, need to be read: Kiplings language is rhetorically thick,
every sentence charged, yet the action fast-moving. As well as Mowglis adventure
s, The Jungle Books also present quieter, related tales such as The Miracle of Puru
n Bhagat, the life of a kind of Indian Saint Francis, beloved by animals.

While Kipling will doubtless continue to roil 21st-century readers, to simply di

smiss his work with a boo or smirk of cultural superiority reveals little but cu
ltural ignorance. Read The Jungle Books, the exquisite and ghostly They and Wireless
nd a dozen other stories to discover for yourself their imaginative greatness. A
s I said at that conference, Kipling is a wonderful writer.
Michael Dirda reviews books on Thursdays in Style.
By Rudyard Kipling
Edited by Kaori Nagai
Penguin. 381 pp. Paperback, $11
edition.cnn.com
CNN.com - Neil Gaiman:

I enjoy not being famous

At the intersection of a dozen Venn diagrams

July 30, 2001 Posted: 3:21 p.m. EDT (1921 GMT)

Neil Gaiman, author of
By Porter Anderson
CNN Career
(CNN) -- He s way ahead of you.
"The next big project after American Gods is already written. This is more or
less a first in my lifetime, being a book ahead. It s a children s book. It s ca
lled Coraline (CORAL-line), and it s a novel for strange little girls of all a
ges and genders. Me and Lewis Carroll. Kids think it s an adventure story and re
ally cool. Adults get nightmares -- my agent and my editor -- said, This is muc
h too spooky for kids. "
Neil Gaiman all but sags against the phone as he talks, exhausted from a weeks-l
ong book-signing tour of some 45 to 50 stops in the United Kingdom, Canada and t
he United States. Just this weekend, he arrived back at what he steadfastly refe
rs to as "my big Addams Family house" near Minneapolis, Minnesota, ready to reac
quaint himself with his wife and children ages "18, 16 and almost 7."
EXTRA INFORMATION
But first, he goes once more into the breech of the Internet to update his onlin
e journal at NeilGaiman.com -- "There s a review of American Gods in the New Y
ork Times Book review," he announces to his fans, "the first time I ve been revi
ewed in the Times since 1990" for "Good Omens."
And so there is. "Neil Gaiman s new book is a noirish sci-fi road trip novel," w
rites Kera Bolonik in the Times, "in which the melting pot of the United States
extends not merely to mortals but to a motley assortment of disgruntled gods and
deities."
Gaiman, online, picks out a second-edition dust-cover blurb with the unerring ai
m of a 40-year-old writer who knows his industry: "I am now officially," he chor
tles in his journal to his fans, " a fine, droll storyteller (The New York Times
). "
But he is also -- don t let his rollicking Net-headedness fool you -- an incisiv
e creation of his own making, rakish wearer of downtown-black and tribal shaman
to "a handful of beautiful goths and a handful of boys in dresses and a handful
of sci-fi fans and a handful of nervous young girls with multicolored hair and t
he people who look normal and the people who look like somebody s mom. I exist a
t the intersection of a dozen Venn diagrams."
Or maybe it s that intersection in New Oxford Street, London, where Gaiman was s
igning copies earlier this month at the Forbidden Planet bookstore and the Daily
Telegraph turned out to enjoy the sheer scope of Gaiman s cult -- or cults. "On
ce you ve spent weeks on the Sunday Times list, I m not sure you can count as a
cult writer."
Gaiman clearly is enjoying riding the crest of a rising tide of attention for th
e often-derided literary genre called fantasy. "While Grisham may still be bette
r known than Gaiman," writes the Telegraph s S.F. Said, "in today s world, gods
and myths far outsell courtroom drama, or indeed almost anything else. Where not
so long ago, the fantastic, the supernatural, the mystical existed on the cultu
ral fringes, they seem to be everywhere today. They are central to so many of te

levision s top programmes -- Buffy (the Vampire Slayer,

a, the Teenage Witch, Roswell. "

The X-Files,

Sabrin

And did somebody short, some Potter kid, just walk through the room?
"I m taking enormous pleasure at watching all this happen," Gaiman says, "and lo
ok at the weird little side fallouts: Michael Dirda in the Washington Post felt
moved enough by the responses in-house to his lengthy and positive review of Am
erican Gods to write this amazing little article on fantasy. And on why missing
it is short-sighted, foolish and betrays a lack of understanding of the basics
of English literature."
"Many readers," Dirda wrote in the Post on July 1, "simply can t stomach fantasy
. They immediately picture elves with broadswords or mighty-thewed barbarians wi
th battle axes, seeking the bejeweled Coronet of Obeisance ... (But) the best fa
ntasies pull aside the velvet curtain of mere appearance. ... In most instances,
fantasy ultimately returns us to our own now re-enchanted world, reminding us t
hat it is neither prosaic nor meaningless, and that how we live and what we do t
ruly matters."
My worst fantasy
"When you re 11, walking home from school through this strange little English la
ndscape, running these weird, wonderful things through your head ... well, now t
his is one of those I ve never told anybody this before things," Gaiman says c
onspiratorially, "but here we go:
"My worst fantasy was a really cool one. I got to kidnap all of the authors whos
e work I liked, living and dead -- I got to go round and round up G.K. Chestert
on and Geoffrey Chaucer and all of these guys. Then I got to lock them in an eno
rmous castle and make them collaborate on these huge-plot books. And I would tel
l them what the plots were.
graphic Selected works of
Neil Gaiman
American Gods : a novel, William Morrow, June
Stardust : a children s novel, Avon Books, 1999 (originally a four-part series
released by DC Comics starting in 1997)
Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions : short stories and poems, Avon
Books, 1998
Neverwhere : a novel, Avon Books, 1997
The Day I Swapped My Dad for 2 Goldfish : children s book, with illustrations b
y Dave McKean, White Wolf Publishing, 1997
Death: The High Cost of Living : three-part series, DC Comics, 1993
Angels and Visitations: A Miscellany : short fiction, prose and journalism coll
ection, limited printing, DreamHaven, 1993
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch : a novel w
ith Terry Pratchett, short stories and poems, 1990
Sandman : comics series, DC Comics, 1989-1996
Signal to Noise : serialized novella, published in "The Face," 1989-1990
Don t Panic: The Official "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" Companion : Pocket
Books, 1988
Violent Cases: Words & Pictures : with illustrations by Dave McKean, 1987
Ghastly Beyond Belief : a novel, 1985
"I was about 10 years old. And I plotted this 12-volume giant epic about these p
eople going off to collect these rocks from all over the universe.
"As daydreams go, it says an awful lot about me as a young man: I wasn t confide
nt enough about my ability to come up with stories. I was coming up with this hu
ge, intricate story in order to justify in my daydreams of creating stories."

About that "strange little English landscape" the daydreaming young Gaiman walke
d through: He was born in Porchester in Hampshire, in the south of England, and
grew up in Sussex. Gaiman is the son of a vitamin-company owner and a pharmacist
. He has two younger sisters, neither in the business.
"I was always the weird one," he says without a trace of self-criticism, just am
used analysis. "It never occurred to me that I was weird. The lovely thing about
being the first child is that nobody has anything to measure against, so nobody
knows they re weird.
When I was 7, I was obsessively alphabetizing my books, so I could find them imm
ediately -- and worrying about whether Roger Lancelyn Green s Tales of Ancient
Egypt should be filed under L or G. Now, what kind of 7-year-old worries ab
out that?"
Well, the kind who would grow up to install some of that mythology into "Sandman
," Gaiman s early-1990s 2,000-page comic-book from DC Comics -- Norman Mailer ca
lled it "a comic strip for intellectuals."
In 1992, Gaiman and wife Mary moved the family to the States, although he retain
s his British citizenship -- "I remain in my own little way an English person, t
he queen would be very hurt ..." -- and he has done a fairly fantastic wizard s
job of casting his spells in many directions.
A three-part series, "Death: The High Cost of Living," has been green-lighted fo
r a second screenplay treatment -- "just as I started this signing tour, of cour
se" -- by Warner Bros., a sister AOL Time Warner company to CNN.com. And Hollywo
od is the setting for many of Gaiman s projects to come, he says.
Meanwhile, "Stardust" and "Smoke and Mirrors" were just re-released in June by P
erennial, having been originally published in 1999 and 1998, respectively.
Gaiman surveys quickly the work of some of his favorite fellows in fantasy. Ther
e s Jonathan Carroll ("The Land of Laughs," February, St. Martin s Press), whom
Gaiman calls "an international publishing phenomenon waiting to happen." And the
re s the better-known Michael Chabon ("The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
," 2000, Random House).
"I, on the other hand," Gaiman says, "am all over the place. But I still rejoice
in the status of Who? I m not and never will be a John Grisham. But we re now
at the point where several million Sandman collections have been sold, let al
one several million comics. Neverwhere came out (in July 1997) in the United S
tates and I m told it s pushing half-a-million copies.
"My stuff comes out and
best-selling author you
two responses now to my
he other is, What does

it gets read. Forbes magazine once described me as the

ve never heard of. I like the fact that there are only
name. One is, Oh, my God, I read him, I love him and t
he do?

"I enjoy not being famous. I drive my publicist mad by declining to do things li
ke the David Letterman show or People magazine (another AOL Time Warner company)
, because I don t particularly like being a personality, I like being about the
story I m telling, I like being about the books."
That said, Gaiman admits he also likes reading his writings "on the stage -- I k
now I can do it because I have faith in the material. That s something I can do.
Tell me you want to cast me in Chekhov, that becomes more problematical. The ot
her day, I was in a huge bookstore in Vancouver and the effect of the sound syst
em upstairs where we were was such that we alarmed all the people downstairs. I
just abandoned the whole thing and I read loudly -- it was not a performance wit

h any subtlety at all."

And now that he s off that reading-and-signing-and-shouting tour, it s a matter,
he says, of catching up on six weeks lost to the work-stopping realities of hot
els and planes and bookstores.
"I wound up trying to explain to my mother, who at one point actually asked, Bu
t don t you have people who can do that for you? " And which part would those "p
eople" do, the writing of the books or the signing of them in bookstores?
No fantasy intervenes to spare the author these duties: "Mom, it s all me."
[watercooler]

theguardian.com
Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman
I was 22 when I met Gene Wolfe. The last volume in The Book of the New Sun, The
Citadel of the Autarch, had just been published, and I had been reading his fict
ion since my teens.
I was as impressed and delighted by the Book of the New Sun as I was intimidated
by it. Wolfe s use of language, the grand sweep of his story, the way he used s
cience fiction to illuminate ideas and people and to stretch my mind in ways it
had never been stretched before, the way he played with memory and gave us a per
fectly reliable unreliable narrator all these things thrilled me. (Years later,
Michael Dirda of the Washington Post would call it "The greatest fantasy novel w
ritten by an American," and he would be right.)
I was a young journalist, and I asked for and was given an interview with Wolfe.
I do not know what I expected, but whatever I imagined the author of those glit
tering, dangerous stories to have been, I was not expecting the genial gentleman
I met. He was a former potato crisp engineer and magazine editor, and he remind
ed me of a sweeter-natured, rotunder Sergeant Bilko. Oddly, perhaps, given the d
ifference in our ages and temperaments, we became friends. And now, almost 30 ye
ars later, we are still friends and I am still a fan.
I ve met too many of my heroes, and these days I avoid meeting the few I have le
ft, because the easiest way to stop having heroes is to meet them, or worse, hav
e dinner with them. But Gene Wolfe remains a hero to me. He s just turned 80, lo
oks after his wife Rosemary, and is still writing deep, complex, brilliant ficti
on that slips between genres. He s my hero because he keeps trying new ways of w
riting and because he remains as kind and as patient with me as he was when I wa
s almost a boy. He s the finest living male American writer of SF and fantasy po
ssibly the finest living American writer. Most people haven t heard of him. And
that doesn t bother Gene in the slightest. He just gets on with writing the next
book.