Forgotten god in _American Gods_

[thymidinekinase]

This is really out-of-nowhere, I know, but:
In Neil Gaiman's _American Gods_, who is the god you can't remember when you talk to him?

Comments

Hi Anna!

[jolinn.livejournal.com]

I just noticed you friended me today, and noticed this question. Curiously enough, I never found out the answer to this question myself, and recently read an old interview with Gaiman, where he joked about "not remembering" the god either.

My personal bet is that the god is Hades/Pluto.

The case:

(i) He's one of the "old gods", siding with Odin against the new gods
(ii) Hades/Pluto was associated with wealth, and Lethe, which bordered the underworld (If there's an American underworld, Vegas sort of comes close...)
(iii) Hades had a helm of invisibility, that rendered him unseen and unportrayed in art.
(iv) The Greeks had no real name for Hades (Hades wasn't his actual name), and would never speak his name even if they did.
(v) Persephone: Naturally, Hades would want to know her fate.

I did more than a normal-amount-of-googling about the subject, and the only other "good" answer I found was the Egyptian god 'Amen', who was the god of the hidden or unseen things, and later became Amen-Ra (though I don't think he had any specific connection to wealth).

There's not nearly as much evidence to this, but if you've ever been to Las Vegas, there are only two hotesl you can leave and have "New York New York" on your left: The Excalibur, and the Luxor (with the enormous pyramid theme... gaudy enough to hold our American manifestation of an Egyptian god).

Gaiman seems to be unforthcoming on the subject, so he may have just made the god up out of thin air -- maybe it's Luck, Gambling, or whatever. That might put him on the side of the new, intangible gods -- something like "Smoke and Mirrors" which would fit well in Vegas.

Re: Hi Anna!

[thymidinekinase.livejournal.com]

That's the best answer I've heard so far. The only thing it doesn't fit with is Gaiman's caginess on the subject. He apparently gets asked about that god in nearly every interview, and always changes the subject, says that he doesn't recall, or something.

Authors are a cruel lot

[jolinn.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm sort of torn. His caginess indicates it might be something he made up just to torture people into guessing who the god actually is, and on the other, the god has so many specific details about him, it's hard to think it's not a specific god, and he's just not telling us until someone guesses right, or he's had his fun (see: Robert Jordan and 'Who Killed Asmodean?').

That said, I really liked American Gods, but I'm really not sure if it was Hugo-worthy: It was too derivative of other things (Small Gods, Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, and even Sandman) to allow it to be really A+ material. OTOH, I'm re-reading it now, so it's better than most.