My Heart Laid Bare by Joyce Carol Oates

My Heart Laid Bare by Joyce Carol Oates 531 pg.

     This is one of five gothic novels that Oates wrote around the same time but then were published at various later times. This was published in 1998 and tells the story of Abraham Licht, who makes his living as a confidence man.  His several children  start out adoring him but eventually are destroyed or driven away.  He views his children as extensions of himself and insists upon using them in whatever way will maximize profit in his various scams. The oldest son Thurston almost hangs for murder, the second son Harwood is murdered and in a gruesome way, his daughter embarks on a love affair with her adopted brother and  he is banished as a result and she forced into a lackluster marriage.  The younger children fare somewhat better, Darian becomes a tortured avant-garde musician and Esther trains as a nurse and joins the suffragettes.  Yet all must leave their father or be destroyed in turn as he descends into madness as the culmination of his criminal life.
It's a strange and haunting book with an  implication of a criminal ancestor who haunts a mysterious and forbidding marsh.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

     This is I believe my 5th book for the Chunky Challenge. I hadn't read any Neil Gaiman books before but he's so popular and this book in particular, that I thought I'd better read it. I found it a very original book with an interesting premise. The premise being that if gods are real then the ancient gods are still among us but neglected. An important corollary to this premise is that the old gods of the ancient world were brought to America by immigrants who still believed in them at the time they arrived. So now there are gods established in America and by gods here I mean  Norse gods, Egyptian gods, Greek gods, fairies, and other pre-Christian deities. But as America has changed over the last 200 years or so, the old gods have become forgotten and degraded, more like someone who's down on their luck. So Gaiman has fashioned a world where the once powerful gods live in the seedy underbelly of America.  They live in out of the way places, performing unpleasant jobs or existing on limited means as well as criminal activity.
     The book revolves around Shadow, aptly named because he's a shadowy character. He's in prison and due to be released soon when he's told his wife has been killed in a car accident.  On a plane to the funeral he meets Mr. Wednesday who, after a strange series of events, hires him to do whatever Mr. Wednesday needs.  The clue to Mr. Wednesday's identity is of course that Wednesday is his day so he's Odin. This association with Mr. W. leads Shadow through a series of experiences, meeting gods and sort of knowing about them but not really, that make up the bulk of the story. I can't even begin to relate details because there's too much and it's too complicated but in the end Shadow has to stop a war between the old gods and those things that represent modern America that has been engineered by Mr. W. to feed him power.
     Gaiman is British but living in America now and a large part of the book is a reflection of his particular take on America. He seems fascinated by the obscure, bizarre, repulsive and crazy aspects of American culture. It's interesting for me to speculate if that's how America is seen when viewed through the eyes of a outsider.. A  lot of the things he seems enamored of seem to me a joke or something to roll one's eyes about. Of course, undoubtedly that's the point! Another part to the book that's worth reflecting on is the nature of worship.  The ancient gods demanded horrible sacrifices and so how would that look in twenty-first America?  One way it could appear would be as horrific crime or just general degradation of the human being.  It's interesting and  creepy to think about just as this is an interesting and creepy book.