Everything is neatly organized here …

Neil Gaiman’s fantasy novel American Gods is a version of that most American genre, the road narrative. The author sends his protagonist, Shadow, by car and sometimes by Greyhound bus on long journeys criss-crossing the midwest of the United States. Though all the book’s characters are American – even the re-embodied Norse gods – the narrative is a way for a non-American (Gaiman originally comes from Hampshire) to explore the eccentricities of his adopted land. Like Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita, much of which is a road narrative, Gaiman charts the peculiarities of small-town USA with a foreigner’s relish and curiosity.

The road narrative befits a nation in love with the motor car and networked with roads – but also a country that is so vast. An American road narrative can take you to real places and feel confident that even American readers will not have been there themselves. It is because the country is so big that the identities of states – most of them fixed by arbitrary straight lines on a map – have such romance. “Shadow drove west, across Wisconsin and Minnesota and into North Dakota, where the snow-covered hills looked like huge sleeping buffalo.”

Mr Wednesday, the con-man who employs Shadow after his release from prison, sets him off on his road trips. The plot conveniently requires him to avoid the interstate highways that leave the small towns of America to one side. The mysterious organisation of black-suited “spooks” who threaten and pursue Shadow are presumed to monitor the motorway system. “We must assume … that they are in enemy hands. Or that they are perhaps enemy hands in their own right,” as Mr Nancy, one of the gods, puts it. So Shadow must travel by the back roads that go through towns and take him to an undiscovered country.

“Dawn found them in Princeton, Missouri.” “He passed through Normal, and Bloomington, and Lawndale.” The very names of the towns through which we travel have a kind of poetry. We visit Thebes and Peru and Cairo – at the last of which the local funeral parlour is run by two dapper gents who turn out to be reincarnated Egyptian gods. The towns are ticked off with the figures for their populations that American road signs weirdly (to British eyes) provide. “He stopped in El Paso, IL (pop 2,500).” The novel drolly records the proclamations of fame that also often dignify these signs. “The extra sign announced that the town’s Under-14s team was the third runner-up in the interstate Hundred-Yard Sprint, or that the town was the home of the Illinois Girls’ Under-16s Wrestling semifinalist.” You wonder for a second whether these are parodies, or real examples. Some parochial claims to fame are a little more impressive – “He drove through Chester (‘Home of Popeye’)” – but invariably, road signs are a delight. “He drove over a big, muddy river, and laughed out loud when he saw that the name of it, according to the sign, was the Big Muddy River.” Only in America.

Road narratives always involve unscheduled stops, and Shadow stays in some of these towns. He becomes a mortician’s assistant for a while in Cairo and – in a peculiarly creepy subplot – endures a winter sojourn in the town of Lakeside, Wisconsin. Mr Wednesday has sent him to this freezing but friendly place for reasons best known to himself. Here Shadow discovers the bonds of community feeling and stoical good humour that small-town America is supposed to exhibit. But he also discovers a dark supernatural secret that preserves its supposed happiness.

Jack Kerouac’s memoir-novel On the Road (1957) made the journey by car across the United States into both a recognised ritual and a literary genre. It is not by chance that some of the most famous examples of road novels are close to autobiography (Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is another, notorious example). The road narrative charts the personal exploration of a “real” America and can hardly be trusted if it does not draw on experience. Sure enough, Gaiman, who has resisted providing sources or explanations for his mythological materials, tells us in a new introduction to his novel that it was written during his own journeys back and forth across the States. “I drove from Minneapolis to Florida by back roads, following routes I thought Shadow would take in the book … I did my best not to write about any place I had not been.” And it is curiously appropriate that Gaiman stirs his gods into this mix. Americans have long treated the road narrative as the record of a religious experience, and Gaiman’s novel is really just taking this idea to a logical conclusion.