Mario Puzo and the Cultural Gatekeepers

Given the importance of the response of those cultural gatekeepers, the Literary Critics, to the endurance of wide interest in a work of fiction it seems worth saying something of the interest--or lack of interest--of said critics in Mario Puzo's The Godfather. Considering this from this standpoint of their well-known inclinations it seems that they would automatically regard Puzo's book as suspect because of its immense popular success (it was the second-highest seller of 1969 according to the Publisher's Weekly list), all as one has to admit that Puzo does not offer what the critics acclaim, and much that they dislike. In an era in which critics have tended to identify Important Literature with ostentatiously "wacky" postmodernism Puzo was a literary realist--and not the kind of literary realist they celebrate. Puzo is a storyteller, not a story shower, as indeed he had to be to make his rather large, complicated, narrative accessible to a popular audience--though of course the critics consider that no excuse, form coming in ahead of content with them as it matters not that what they call "style" is a container incapable of holding anything. Meanwhile even at a more modest level his prose is pulpy stuff in the roughest sense of the term, reading which the adherent of the Cult of the Sentence would wince again and again. One also has to admit that the structure of the book is uneven, and all too obviously so for the less than estimable purpose of cramming in as much Harold Robbins-y sex-and-glamour as the narrative can hold (hence much of what we see in Los Angeles and Vegas, and how much we read of such things as Lucy Mancini's pelvic floor), unbalancing the narrative, slowing the progress of the story, and frankly giving long stretches of the book a trashy feel that the more serious reader may find off-putting, and even embarrassing. Indeed, one may well feel that in its largely cutting out this material to concentrate on the main thread of events the film improved significantly on the novel.

At the same time those ways in which Puzo is more impressive tend not to impress them. Puzo's story's beginning with an epigram out of Balzac's Father Goriot ("Behind every great fortune there is a great crime") is not the sewing of a patch of purple onto rags but a genuinely meaningful allusion that not only paid homage to a genuine influence on Puzo, but declared his book for Balzac's tradition. For here Puzo is writing about the things that mattered to Balzac as they did to him, like the contact of traditional values and loyalties with capitalist modernity, with the "machinery of civilization" as Henry James called it and the ways in which it undergirds that modern life, with the corruption and brutalization that are the dark side of that machinery--and the book has a lot of interest that way for those open to it. But the critics keeping the cultural gates aren't among them, insisting that writers desirous of their good opinion not touch such matters, and just as this attitude has cost that titan of world literature Balzac a large and important measure of their esteem, so does it count among Puzo's disadvantages with them (all as James, in rejecting what they do not like in Balzac in his own work, stands higher in their esteem for his disregard for "the machinery").

Of course, one may think that Puzo would still have some interest for our postmodernism-minded literati. They may prefer not to hear of the nuts and bolts of our economic or social life, prefer not to hear that attention must be paid to their undergirding of the drama of the modern world, but they are positively obsessed with identity, and ethnicity, and might this book not have something to commend it to them that way? After all, in 1969, to use Michael Lind's schema, the transformation of "Anglo-America" into "Euro-America" was a fairly recent thing, and the day when Sicilians were outside the mainstream of the country's life, relentlessly Othered in it, was not so far behind. For Caucasians that they are, they also came from the Mediterranean region, and especially in stereotype, were associated with darker complexions and other physical traits that for a certain sort of mind evoked "Black Africa" or "the Orient," which physical Otherness people of such mind tended to make so much of that they often crossed the line into exaggeration and caricature, actually "Africanizing" and "Orientalizing" Sicilians in depictions of them (often intentionally mobilizing the force of those prejudices in support of anti-Sicilian, anti-Italian, prejudice, and reinforcing those other prejudices in the process), all as they characterized the Sicilian, the Italian, as bearers of a culture and religion the nativist deemed alien and threatening, backward in its ideas about women and much else, and associated with crime and radicalism and violence. (If supposed to be entirely lacking in the martial virtues they were still individually volatile, vicious, dangerous, and their organization a mortal threat to the nation.) Unsurprisingly a common response among even people who insisted like George F. Babbitt that "I haven't got one particle of race-prejudice . . ." was to hysterically, neurotically, fall all over themselves insisting that those Caucasians were not White like those whose country this properly was, sentiment expressed in people of "South Italian" background having to check their own separate box on government documents officially acknowledging their exclusion from "Whiteness" ("Southern Italians" having their own box in an earlier America). Indeed, the national preoccupation with the Sicilian/Italian Mafia at the time of Puzo's bestseller (it was no accident that 1969 also saw Don Pendleton launch, and set the tone for, the men's action-adventure paperback boom with the unsubtly titled War Against the Mafia) had much more than a whiff of racist hysteria about it, such that the Italian-American Civil Rights League, founded in response to said hysteria, was very, very concerned about the film (and its sensitivities consequential enough that through the entire running time of the most famous Mafia movie of all time the word "Mafia" is not uttered even once).

Alas, this side of the complicated history of racial prejudice in America, the all too obvious parallels between the prejudice against Italian-Americans and later immigrant groups against whom discrimination looms very large in the political life of today, mean less than nothing to the identity politics-minded postmodernist, are indeed awkward for them. For they clash with their preferred priorities, their preferred narratives--important to which is their treating the ways in which people identify themselves today as if they were eternally meaningful categories, which always were and always be, such that the stupidities a Whoopi Goldberg speaks on The View are not some anomaly attributable to a simple "lack of education" but entirely reflective of the ideas of the so-called "educated," even "ultra-educated," of our time, to whom Whiteness is monolithic, racism between Caucasians is a logical impossibility, and the Corleones accordingly "a bunch of White people." Indeed, the principals among that family are not just White people but also straight White males in a very male-centered, frankly very macho, book, making the book not only uninteresting to them but deeply offensive for those for whom "smash the patriarchy" is a battle cry and the "centering of other perspectives" an unceasing demand--with the massive freight of sex stuff the novel carried really, really not helping on the score, and the same going for the traditionalism that prevails in the narrative where gender roles are concerned. (In contrast with the adaptation of the story in the film trilogy, where the first film ends with Kay's evident alienation from her husband after realizing he had his brother-in-law killed, contributing to the destruction of their marriage seen in the sequels, in the novel we get one more chapter past Kay's discovery showing Michael Corleone's wife Kay reconciled to the position of a don's wife as she follows in the footsteps of her ceaselessly churchgoing Catholic mother-in-law praying for the soul of a husband whom she no longer dare ask about his business because she knows its nature all too well--the last scene in the book not the closing of a door in her face so that her husband and his associates can discuss business, but a thoroughly converted and Catholicized Kay making one of the trips to Church to pray for her husband's soul that are now such a part of her life.) Indeed, in an age in which so much store is set by conformity to a "woke" gender politics, this aspect alone would seem to render the book unworthy in the eyes of the gatekeepers--all as their broader attitude has helped to overdetermine the decline of interest in Puzo's book in the decades since its appearance.