Genre Soup, Part 1
I just finished reading Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, and it raises questions about genre that have been on my mind for months. So I’m going to focus for a few posts on genre, and the slippery business of labeling fiction. What categories/distinctions make sense? Which seem more of a product of bias against subject matter or type of writer? Where are the lines in the fictional sand, and why?
Gaiman’s books are usually shelved in science fiction and/or fantasy. Sometimes even horror. Yet if I were classifying American Gods, I would call it a literary novel. It has the same intricate plotting, complexity of themes and depth of character as Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay. Its magic isn’t any more sci-fi than Toni Morrison’s Beloved or Paradise.
What happens to gods when people stop believing in them? To say that Gaiman takes on one of the Big Questions in American Gods hardly covers it. Yet Shadow’s story is so grounded that the question is never didactic, though it’s openly discussed by the gods who limp, saunter and otherwise show up in Shadow’s life after he agrees to work for the mysterious Mr. Wednesday.
Shadow is a down-on-his-luck everyman who discovers, two days before his expected release from prison, that his wife has been killed in a car accident. As the details of this accident emerge, Shadow has to face some difficult truths about the woman he loved, the most fantastical of which is the fact that she comes to him, formaldehyde stink and all, the night after her funeral.
With nothing holding him anywhere, Shadow embarks with Mr. Wednesday on a journey he doesn’t begin to understand, knowing he’s been hired to run errands and be a body guard and not to ask questions. But Shadow begins to understand, and it’s his journey to understanding, and to himself, that are central to his odyssey.
I won’t give away anything here, because the plot is intricate and exquisite, and to reveal any of it is to spoil the pleasure of discovery. The story’s ending is as achingly perfect as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay, which is about the highest compliment I can think of.
So why is this book “science fiction” or “urban fantasy,” just two of the genres applied to it in reviews? Isn’t it simply high-caliber fiction? If this were written by a woman would it be considered “magical realism”? Or consigned, since there is a love story involved, to the ghetto of “paranormal romance”?
Tomorrow, some of the answers I’ve found, and more questions.