Books: The Godfather Returns by Mark Winegardner

A whacked idea

By John Ziebell

The most famous line from The Godfather--either Francis Ford Coppola's version or the original Mario Puzo novel--is, of course, that bit about the offer that cannot be refused. And with the high-profile launch of The Godfather Returns, we know what offer won't be turned down by even the most well-reputed of publishers: the craven opportunity to cash in on a cultural milestone that, in fairness, gains little from being revisited.

The first Coppola film, drawn from Puzo's 1969 novel, came out 32 years ago. A critical and popular success, it provided inside information on the world of organized crime and also made mobsters--at least some of them--the good guys. Before The Godfather, the Mafia was less a part of America's cultural dialogue than its urban mythology; since then, popular fiction, nonfiction, TV dramas and Hollywood features have covered and recovered the terrain.

Coppola's picture did the mob first, but films as different as Goodfellas and Miller's Crossing have done it better since, and it's hard to move backward. A new novel based on the late Puzo's work is even more problematic. In terms of literary and cultural currency, three decades is far more than a lifetime. In 1969, the story idea was fresh, and Puzo broke some stylistic ground; then, any sex scene was notable, well-written or not, as were the book's stranglings, shootings and dismemberments. But times change, and a sensational novel has to work much harder to earn its keep when nightly news is more graphic than Puzo ever was. None of this might matter if we were discussing a work that simply extended Puzo's literary landscape, but The Godfather Returns limits its retro storyline to narrow chronological blanks in both Puzo's novel and Coppola's films. The question that arises is...why?

The Godfather Returns is written by Mark Winegardner, winner of a widely publicized search for an author to follow in Puzo's footsteps. While Winegardner is a better stylist, the pitch to both recapture old and create new readership confines him within a limited conceit and demands that he preserve the future by not amending the past. Puzo's original cast can be fine-tuned, but we already know what happens to them after this book ends.

Originality is hard-won in a predestined world. Michael and Kay Corleone can cavil and whine all they want, but they can't change the course of their relationship. Michael's brother Fredo can be outed as a sociopathic closet homosexual, but that won't alter his future. We glean new insights into consigliere Tom Hagen, but so what? And while newly created characters like Corleone soldier-turned-rival Nick Geraci can be well-drawn, they must also be defused by the time the novel ends. The issue of celebrity also has an impact. In 1969, Puzo, an original but not particularly eloquent storyteller, roughly fictionalized real-life people by changing their names but little else; a newly released novel that uses aliases for figures as patently transparent as Frank Sinatra or John and Bobby Kennedy feels either frivolous or clumsy.

The book is carefully structured to stand alone as a novel, but pays a price to provide nonredundant backstory for those who haven't read Puzo's work lately, if ever. There's nothing specifically wrong with the writing except for the insistence on finding awkward ways to tell readers how Italian names should be pronounced and, infrequently, the inexplicably unreadable sentence like "Geraci could see in Fredo's eyes that he was mad, but the smile lingered gruesomely on his face of the underboss." Some readers may still believe enough in Puzo's vision of the mob's glory days to be won over by The Godfather Returns. For others, the murkiness lies not in the book's language, but in its intent--the same criticism most generally aimed at the third, and by far least successful, of the trilogy of films that truly translated Puzo's work into posterity.