Which is why I picked up Gaiman's "American Gods" a few weeks ago. And I wish I'd enjoyed it more than I did. Which, ok, I did enjoy it a little bit. But it wasn't really absorbing. Without Pratchett's collaboration, Gaiman comes across as a very, very smart guy who's more interested in ideas than in storytelling. The end result is something cool, a bit didactic, somewhat entertaining, but never fully gripping.
Short synopsis: Our protagonist, Shadow, finishes a stint in prison only to go to work for a mysterious figure named "Wednesday." Wednesday, it turns out, is the American version of the Norse god Odin, who is rounding up all the other ancient gods brought to these shores by ancient cultures from around the world to mount a final all-consuming battle against the new gods who are displacing them in American culture -- the gods of debt, technology, credit cards and cable TV, among others.
Which gives you a taste of where "American Gods" is coming from -- a wry critique on the culture, which creates its gods in living, breathing form through the act of worship. The end battle, when it comes, doesn't really offer us insight about the critique -- it's there to round the story out. The result is a "novel of ideas" -- a term that usually describes books that are overly preachy -- that doesn't really commit to being a novel or to its own ideas.
But maybe I'm expecting too much. "American Gods" is reasonably diverting, so long as Neil Gaiman's reputation hasn't been oversold to you. And better an novel of incomplete ideas than no ideas at all.
