pynchon in American Gods; American Gods in me

[Joseph Tracy]

This scene takes place after the main character has died  after 9 days tied to the world ash ( in honor of the murdered Odin)and is doing a review of his past while entering the underworld. He is remembering his mother's death bed and seeing himself reading a book by her bedside.

"Shadow wondered what the book was, and he walked around the hospital bed to inspect it more closely. He stood between the bed and the chair looking from the one to the other, the big boy hunched into his chair, his nose buried in Gravity’s Rainbow, trying to escape from his mother’s death into London during the blitz, the fictional madness of the book no escape and no excuse."

Gaiman, Neil (2011-06-21). American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition: A Novel (p. 421). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. 

Gaiman's prose is a storyteller's. He doesn't do long complex sentences or formal experimentation. But he knows what he is about and American Gods is rather like doing a vicarious back flip off the high dive into shallow water  and missing the concrete because shallow can get pretty deep, surprising and exhilarating. I'm finding it enjoyable both as escape and as a consideration of how myths change and stay the same.  How we carry them and they carry us.

I'm just back from Okinawa and San Francisco and think I have slept off the jet lag. Okinawa is both different and familiar with both medieval castles feminist shamanism  and jet fighter bases. I was born in San Francisco and the geology and flora of the entire region are home but the city itself has always been an impenetrable mystery of immense dimensions. Still, it soothes me at the same time it indifferently mocks my estrangement.