The Godfather (Criticism)

Criticism

David Kelly

Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and composition at Oakton Community College in Illinois. In the following essay, Kelly argues that, in spite of its popularity and technical achievements, irregularities in point of view make Puzo's novel weak.

Mario Puzo's 1969 crime epic The Godfather was hugely popular, shattering the sales records of its time. In addition to the number of books put into circulation, it created a trend in novels about organized crime, packing the paperback book racks at airports and drugstores with imitators, each using a copycat book design and using the word "father," "family," or "honor" in its title. But, beyond its popular success, it is not clear whether The Godfather succeeds as literature.

Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive — something can be popular and still be artistically worthwhile — but it is very seldom that a writer can achieve one without sacrificing the other. Books that attract millions of readers tend to have fans who see something of themselves in them. These fans are willing to see great merit even when it is not present, like parents who cannot concede that their perfectly nice children lack talent. On the other hand, artistic snobbery is real and powerful in building and destroying literary reputations: most artists starve, so the novels that do make money are automatically suspected of being hollow imitations of the real thing.

Making it even more difficult to judge the worth of Puzo's book is the fact that it was adapted to a movie that pleased everybody, critics as well as audiences. In the American Film Institute's list of top movies ever made, it comes in at number three, after Citizen Kane and Casablanca; it is number 121 in the list of all-time box-office grosses, and has been a consistent seller in video and DVD releases. As a result, literary critics have a tendency to think that the novel's continued success is less a result of its own merit, and rather a case of riding on the movie's coattails. One critic even guessed that because the movie's director Francis Ford Coppola cowrote the screenplay with Puzo and the movie contained the book's best lines, the good parts of the book were actually Coppola's writing, even though the book was published and selling millions of copies before the two ever met. The book and the film of The Godfather will always be linked and the film will always be considered the greater artistic achievement. Coming in second in a field of two makes it difficult to judge Puzo's novel fairly.

The most accurate way to describe The Godfather artistically as a novel would be to say that it is quite good for a sensationalistic potboiler that was churned out to make money, and that it is quite weak as a serious document of the time it examines or the intricacies of human nature. Its virtues are many: its shortcomings are few, but they are serious enough to hold the book back from true greatness.

Puzo's finest achievement, the one that kept millions of readers turning each page, was his gift for giving each character more personality than just what the book's plot requires of them. His characters have depth: to use a publicist's phrase, they "jump off the page." The smaller, minor characters in any novel are bound to be stereotypes, but Puzo gives all, down to the least significant, some aspect that contradicts their stereotype, hinting at a full, breathing person passing through the story. Kay's father, for instance, only appears in the book for a few pages. He is a New England minister who is approached by the police about his daughter's involvement with organized crime and sexual relations with a suspected murderer. A less intelligent book would have made him act according to type, blowing up with anger or curling with hidden rage. Puzo has him behave with unexpected gentleness toward his daughter and firmness toward the police, giving readers a sharp little surprise without violating what little we know about this man. From the baker who is delighted with his little part of a Mafia wedding to Neri, the family-oriented hit man, the characters have a human touch that takes them beyond just being tools of the plot.

At the next level of characterization Puzo has the three Corleone boys. Independently, none is able to blossom beyond a flat characterization, but it is Puzo's luck or genius to have them all packaged together as a group. Sonny nearly reaches the depths of a vaudevillian comic character with his hotblooded Mediterranean passions: swarthy, oversexed, and impetuous, he seems more like the sort of character that would be created by someone who had never met a real live Italian. Michael, of course, is the diametric opposite. He is never spontaneous or passionate: when after years he is reunited with the woman he loves, he suggests physical intimacy with, "We might as well go in the bedroom." Readers often wonder why Puzo took the time to create the third son, Fredo, who does little in the book but suffer a nervous breakdown and then turn into a womanizer who lets another gangster slap him around. His presence serves to mute the extremes of the other sons: rather than focusing on how, compared to each other, Michael and Sonny are almost unbelievably absolutes, readers focus on how the two sides contrast with the soft, amoral center.

The greatest creation of Mario Puzo's writing career is, without question, the character of Don Vito Corleone. He is all things to all people. He is a lawgiver, an oldworld moralist, a devout family man who loves his children and goes out of his way to help neighbors, asking only friendship in return; but, he is also a murderer and the criminal mastermind who controls everyone's lives to some unseen extent. Sentimentalists can love him as much as paranoids can fear him.

Over and above his memorable characters, Puzo also distinguishes himself with his superb sense of narrative structure, often underrated. The Godfather is not episodic, following just one crisis after another in the life of the Corleone family, but instead it follows a solid, direct line from Vito Corleone at his peak to the events that bring Michael into the family business to Michael's final triumph. This story is fed out slowly, though, so that readers do not even see it taking form at first. The main conflict, which is the gang war started by Sollozzo, does not show up until the long wedding has introduced the characters and the episode with Jack Woltz and the horse's head has established the family's omnipotence. Then, it is introduced subtlety, as just another piece of crime business, with little indication that the meeting with Sollozzo will change the Corleone family forever. Puzo holds back Michael's importance to the plot even longer: before he ends up helping his father avoid assassins, a quarter of the way through the book, it would be difficult to guess that Michael would end up the story's main character. This pacing lets Puzo unleash powerful plot twists throughout the whole book that readers note, only after they have occurred, were inevitable all along.

Though the pacing is masterful and the characters are convincing representations, neither is achieved completely through skill. Puzo uses shortcuts that help him in the short term — tricks that the casual reader will not recognize but which, in the long run, damage the novel's literary worth.

For instance, he makes the Godfather a respectable, honorable, lovable character only by going to preposterous extremes to shade the world in which he lives. Not only does the book refuse to question whether running a crime syndicate might be wrong, it will not even admit that there could be cases where the Don's actions are anything less than angelic. The characters who oppose the Corleones suffer, but they deserve what they get, due to their moral weaknesses: this goes from the Tattaglias, who are involved in "bad" crimes such as drugs and prostitution instead of the Corleones's gambling, extortion, and influence peddling, to Johnny Fontane's first wife, who has not only violated the sanctity of marriage by luring him into divorce but is in addition a foulmouthed tramp.

The Corleones's friends are shown to be just as innocent as their enemies are despicable. They include: Lucy Mancini, the concubine with a heart of gold; Jules Segal, an unerring and compassionate surgeon driven to abortions when he can not stand delivering terrible medical news to uncaring patients; and the widow Columbo, whom young Vito Corleone rescues from eviction. Puzo is able to make these characters contemptible or sympathetic, according to their place in the Don's universe, only by using verbal tricks — loaded language, such as when he describes Don Fanucci as "white, broad [and] smelly" just before Vito shoots him. Casual readers accept the idea that there is no moral complexity among the Corleones's friends and enemies. Attentive readers know that they are being sold an unlikely version of reality.

Technically, Puzo's greatest weakness is in his inability to hold a consistent point of view. The point of view changes every few pages: the action in a scene with Don Corleone and Tom Hagen might be from the Don's point of view, but then the narrative stays with Tom when he leaves and tracks his thoughts. This is acceptable, but it waters down the book's overall effect. Readers are not able to experience the action through any one character's eyes, so they cannot truly feel the effects of the action as they would with a unified narrative. With the point of view floating around like this, the emphasis is on the action and events, not the characters, whom readers come to know only superficially.

There is a way to stay in one character's point of view and convey another character's unspoken thoughts, by having the main character interpret what is going on in the other's head. Puzo does this frequently. For instance, when Kay phones Michael's mother, "Mrs. Corleone's voice came impatiently over the phone." Two paragraphs later, "Mrs. Corleone's voice came briskly over the phone." The narrative remains in Kay's point of view, but readers still know how Mrs. Corleone feels.

Puzo stretches this technique to its limits at times. For example, he has Johnny interpret Jules's thoughts: "Jules stood up. His usual cool was gone, Johnny Fontane noticed with satisfaction." Later in the scene, though, Puzo uses one character's looks to give background information that is in the minds of two characters: "Lucy and Jules looked at each other. From everything they had learned and knew about Johnny Fontane it seemed impossible that he would take a girl from a close friend like Nino." Johnny's thoughts are interpreted by Jules and Lucy simultaneously. Later that scene shifts to Johnny's point of view again. The information is conveyed, but Puzo sacrifices artistic consistency in order to let readers know what everyone thinks about everything.

It takes time to develop a consistent point of view, to introduce information into a novel in ways that could be experienced by just one character at a time. Mario Puzo apparently knew how to do this, but did not take the time. It also takes time and patience to face up to the fact that one's sympathetic characters can be acceptable to audiences in spite of their moral shortcomings, rather than simply ignoring the moral complexity of life. Puzo wrote The Godfather with the specific interest of creating a best seller and making money, and that he did: any variation on the formula might have hurt sales. But he also was quoted as saying that he wished he had written it better, and there is little doubt that he could have. The flaws in the novel are unnecessary, technical ones, but ones that keep it from greatness.

Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on The Godfather, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.

What Do I Read Next?

• Puzo is often considered to have been a serious, artistic writer before he "went commercial" with the publication of The Godfather. Readers can judge this for themselves by reading his 1955 novel The Dark Arena, which was reissued by Ballantine Books in 1999.
• Among Puzo's other novels, The Sicilian comes closest in tone and subject matter to The Godfather. It opens when Michael Corleone is exiled in Italy. Before returning home, the Godfather asks him to find legendary bandit Salvatore Guiliano and bring him back to America. The book tells the story of Guiliano, who is based on an actual person. Published in 1984, it was reissued by Ballantine in 2001.
• One of the few academic studies of The Godfather is Christian K. Messenger's Citing the Don: Mario Puzo and the Meanings of an American Popular Classic. It was published by State University of New York Press in 2002.
• Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard (Il gatto pardo) is a hauntingly beautiful historical novel about Sicily. Lampedusa, himself a Sicilian prince, based his book on his great-grandfather and the turbulence that overcame Sicily as the aristocracy lost power. This book is essential reading for understanding the country and its people. It was published in 1958 and reprinted in 1998 by Pantheon Books.
• The same year that The Godfather was published, 1969, Peter Maas was on the best-seller lists with The Valachi Papers, the biography of Joseph Valachi, a true gangland boss whose life was similar to Don Corleone's. This book, now out of print, was published by Bantam Books.
• In 1999, Peter Maas wrote Underboss: Sammy The Bull Gravano's Life in the Mafia. This book, an "as-told-to" story by a crime operative that turned state's evidence, is full of details about how the underworld works today. It was published by HarperCollins.
• One of the most respected books in the overcrowded category of true stories about organized crime is Gay Talese's Honor Thy Father. Published by Ballantine in 1971 as part of the wave of interest in crime that The Godfather fostered, it is the true story of Joe Bonanno, one of the most notorious New York mob bosses.