This is my second go at this review. I didn’t feel as though my initial review was in-depth enough.
The word “mafia” first began appearing in the mid- to late-1800s in Italy, and the criminal underworld had certainly existed for centuries. But The Godfather really created much of what we think of when we here the word “mafia”. And there’s a logic reason for this: JFK.
Prior to the early 1960s, movies depicting organized crime (like 1932’s Scarface) didn’t talk about “the mafia”. They were “gangster movies”. The JFK administration waged a relentless war, spearheaded by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, against organized crime. Following the conspiracies that arose in the wake of their respective assassinations, the mafia began to take center stage in the minds of Americans.
In 1965, Mario Puzo was a struggling literary novelist – high on laurels, low on cash. He was $20,000 in debt and his most recent novel (The Fortunate Pilgrim) failed to make any waves among critics or the public. He was 45 years old, and had five children. Puzo had reached a point where he had to either sell out and writer a best-seller, or give up on his dream and get a real job.
So he pitched what would become The Godfather, and was given a $5,000 advance. It wasn’t a personal story. He had no ties to the mafia, and had no experience with organized crime (despite what many thought at the time). He spent three years researching the novel, and what he couldn’t find through research, he invented. The end result is full of sex and violence, and spent 67 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list while selling over 9 million copies in two years. It went on to be adapted into perhaps the best movie ever made.
I became a bit of a cinephile in college. We had a local video rental store in the town I lived in, and my girlfriend and I would make a trip there virtually every weekend. I watched everything. It was inevitable that I made my way to Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy. They were phenomenal. Well, two of the three were phenomenal. In all the time since then, I’ve had zero interest in reading the book upon which they were based.
Until this year, apparently. I read Jaws, and The Amityville Horror, and an assortment of early and middle 20th century novels. But I didn’t plan on reading this. After finishing Roots, I planned on delving back into The Wheel of Time….and then I got sidetracked. I can’t even point to any single thing that drew me to The Godfather. It was just sitting in my queue, waiting to be read. I’ve probably had it on my phone for six months. Whatever drew me towards it, I’m thankful that it did. In many ways, this book was just as phenomenal as the movie. In some ways, this book was better than the movie.
Which, while it sounds like high praise, perhaps isn’t quite as extraordinary as it may otherwise seem.
First and foremost, I think Puzo does a superb job building the world of the Godfather. The characters are deep and well-rounded. If anything, he might give too much of a backstory for too many of his characters. Ultimately, I want the story. The plot is what drives everything. There are a lot of excursions into the lives of the characters that are really nothing more than bio-dumps on everyone. To some degree, it gets tedious. But when it works – it really adds another layer to this story that I found captivating. But we aren’t talking Robert Jordan levels of excess, here, so I was able to push through some of the less interesting characters.
Beyond that, if you’ve seen the first movie – you’ve essentially read the book. There are a few differences, but the main thrust of the story holds true. So there weren’t a whole lot of surprises. But the characters were so well developed that my interest never really waned.
Probably the biggest difference between the book and movie is that the character of Johnny Fontaine makes up a full quarter of the novel. He’s the actual God son of Vito Corelone, and was largely based on Frank Sinatra. While he’s an interesting character, huge sections of the book are basically just Fontaine in Hollywood partying and sleeping with lots of women. These sections feel sleazy and disconnected from the family drama in New York. It seems like these sections were written just to include sex in the book – and I kind of think that’s true. One of the best decisions made for the movie was to excise most of these sections of the book.
Overall, even though the book itself is superb, three-quarters of this book are absolutely marvelous. The remaining quarter was unnecessary and only seems to exist because – in an age where Valley of the Dolls is a best-seller – Mario Puzo was doing everything he could to sell books.