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*From a BPAL discussion of American Gods, where someone was complaining about Shadow's personality being unbelievable, more specifically the incident with Czerneborg. Contains spoilers: His grief and depression make shadow very passive. In a sense he is walking dead, like the other side of the Laura coin. There is a sleep walking quality about him that is one way deep grief is expressed. In most television and books, grief is portrayed in a dramatic way because TV, movies, etc.. are about drama. Screaming, dramatic weeping, throwing oneself in the coffin makes for good TV, you see? Some people do react like that, but it's not grief I relate to. The sudden death of a partner is like a stunning blow to the head. It's a while before anything feels quite real.

To me, the lack of outward dramatic behavior signals how incredibly deep Shadow's loss is. His calm reaction to all the craziness and his essential numbness is a realistic depiction of profound grief. It's rare in literature and even rarer in other media, so we are not accustomed to seeing it.

Did they make you read "Death of a Pig" in high school? I still get shivers remembering it. It's an essay about how the daughter raised this pig, beautifully detailed. Woven into it among the calm prosaic description of the life and death of this pig is the authors intense numb grief for the death of the daughter that raised the pig. It is so powerful because he never speaks directly about how he feels about her death. It's indirectness makes it so powerful, so painful for the reader, so profound.

The deepest griefs are like that.

So that's how I read the novel. Ananzi Boys is so much more comfortable because it's about fathers and sons and coming to grips with all of one's self, shadow and bright. It's deep and funny and dark and full of meaning. It's also significantly easier on the heart than staring into all that icy pain, the passivity of a loss that cuts the heart out of a man.

I think the sojourn in the town where they bet on the car going through the ice is symbolic of that numbness, that grief. The ordinary town life going on while the icy landscape hides the reality of deal. The ice melts and show starts to recover, to get himself back, to act and feel again.

Just my opinion, of course, but it feels right to me.