Attention mafianados! at the age of 75, and more than 20 years after Don Vito Corleone and the rest of the Godfather gang abandoned the page for a more glamorous life on the screen, Mario Puzo has started a new family. The Last Don (Random House; 482 pages; $25.95) introduces the Clericuzios, a crime clan based in the Bronx, New York, and at the peak of its dark powers. Fortunately, Puzo too is in top form.
"He definitely views this book as a comeback with a vengeance," says his editor, Jonathan Karp. Five years ago, Puzo had quadruple-bypass surgery, followed by a long and gloomy convalescence. His book in progress, a saga about the Borgias, stalled. He thought he might never write again. But transpose the Machiavellian city-state of the Borgias to a fortress in the Bronx, add a summer palace on Long Island and playgrounds in Las Vegas and Hollywood, and--Ecco!--the godfather of Mafia fiction is back in business.
The timing isn't bad either. In summer even serious readers beg to have their disbelief suspended, and The Last Don obliges. It is a headlong entertainment, bubbling over with corruption, betrayals, assassinations, Richter-scale romance and, of course, family values. As in its famous predecessor, unquestioned loyalty, unexamined cash flow and expedient ways of dealing with competition are givens, but this story is set in the '80s--and the slick Clericuzios make the Corleones seem as if they just got off the boat. Gone from the new novel are the entry-level rackets and suspiciously profitable olive-oil business. Instead, family head Don Domenico Clericuzio rules an Exxon of organized crime aided by a son with a degree from Wharton. All the messiness of securing market share is in the past. Years before, the Clericuzios eliminated their main rivals, the Santadios, in one quick and nasty operation. Imagine a rewrite of Romeo and Juliet in which the Capulets throw a wedding and then slaughter the Montagues before dessert.
Imagine anything you like, and in all probability you would still be hard-pressed to keep up with Puzo's devilish invention. There is scarcely a deadly sin or narrative device that he does not plant in his tale. No other popular writer mixes suds and satire with such disarming effect.
The backdrop of The Last Don may be operatic ("God's world was a prison in which man had to earn his daily bread, and his fellow man was a fellow beast, carnivorous and without mercy"), but the setting and characters are commedia dell'arte. Puzo playfully admires the aging Don Dom. "Early on," he writes, "he had been told the famous maxim of American justice, that it was better that a hundred guilty men go free than that one innocent man be punished. Struck almost dumb by the beauty of the concept, he became an ardent patriot."