Shannon
Hillsborough
A review of this — 9 weeks ago
It’s pretty rare that you read a book – a novel – that gels so neatly with what you think and feel about the world, and gives you a lot more new to think about, to boot. For me, this was such a novel. It’s about gods – gods who are brought to life by people’s belief in them, brought to America in the ideas and thoughts of immigrants, and then who grow old and waste away once those beliefs fade. These gods – all of them living, breathing characters in this rich novel – come from all over the world: Norway and Eastern Europe, Africa and India. But they all have one thing in common: they are all dying in America.
America is a spiritual wasteland, and the gods find themselves competing against new objects of worship – the Internet, automobiles, the media – who have themselves been turned into gods by humans’ adoration of them. And so the great war begins.
Caught in the middle of them all is a recently released convict named Shadow, a non-person who lets life and all the amazing things he sees just roll right past him without really affecting him, who is, in the words of his dead wife, “not really alive.” He becomes the stooge of the god Odin (called Wednesday), a lecherous old man in his American incarnation. Then he hangs on Odin’s tree, and dies – and that’s when his life truly begins.
I have only scratched the surface of the plot and characters of this multilevel novel, with layer after layer that the reader must peel away like an onion. Every page is a discovery, and the gods we meet along the way – whether they are vodoun loa or ancient Egyptian gods of the dead or the cultural heroes born in American legend – all seem familiar, like old friends. And why shouldn’t they be? They live in our heads, too, just as vividly as they live in the pages of this book. This is a journey well worth taking with the impassive Shadow.
