Why A Book about the Mafia is on My Top Ten List

Recently, I responded to a Facebook posting I was tagged in by listing the top ten books that have stayed with me. I normally resist such temptations, but this time, the subject was too alluring. Even as I posted, I knew the folly of what I was doing. I had to post quickly? And keep my list to ten books?

One of the books on my list—at number ten, I listed Mario Puzo’s The Godfather—might seem suspicious, and for a couple of reasons. As a Christian, I admit to being influenced by this violent bestseller? And really, I would list it instead of other books?

I admit that I haven't read the book since high school, at a time (1972) when I saw paperback copies around our school that fell open at the scene where Sonny is having an adulterous liaison that seemed hilarious to the average high school student at the time. And even the author once said it could have been written better. Yes, Puzo himself once said he wished in retrospect that he’d written the book that brought him fame and fortune more carefully. (Most authors say this about their published works, of course, and shouldn't always be believed.)

Lists are arbitrary, and I will admit that mine was certainly influenced by a few things I went through this week. Next week I might think of other books, depending on what I am facing then. But this week, I listed The Godfather at number ten not because of its style or anything other than that I think it belongs in the same category about the American Dream that should be headed by Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The American dream says that if you are willing to work hard and play by the rules, you will get ahead and succeed no matter who you are and no matter what your circumstances might be. The fact that this has not been the case for many people groups is often ignored.

The Godfather is set in an Italian-American immigrant community in New York city and manages to question most of that dogma at just about every turn. From Johnny Fontaine's new movie deal (remember the horse's head scene?) to the importance of corrupt cops and politicians to the plot, the novel manages to say something truthful in an entertaining way about corruption in American politics and business that goes back at least to the Di Medici family and may be as old as Rome. We might as well be honest and note that the same corruption can run through ecclesiastical and academic cultures and hierarchies, though the stakes are often petty.

Sure, there’s that one line near the beginning of the third act in the book where Kay says, “Michael, Senators don’t have people killed.” Michael answers, “Kay, now who is being naïve?” That line often drew knowing chuckles from an audience in the early '70s just getting over the Viet Nam conflict. It still resonates, of course, with all the new conflicts. And it is just a few lines of dialogue. Puzo’s account of an underground syndicate running successfully parallel to the system on the surface and also pulling many of its strings may sound more like the stuff of headlines coming out of Mexico these days. But it is also a stable American story.

For these reasons, I think this book belongs on my top ten list. It’s not a beautiful book. And it may or may not have been written as well as the author was capable of writing. But even in its 1970s bestseller form and its almost comic book figures, it does explore how power works best when it is ignored and mostly hidden from view.

Giving The Great Gatsby (film) a Second Chance

I don’t review films. I enjoy them, but film criticism and lore simply aren’t in my first language. However, The Great Gatsby is one of my favorite novels, and now that I’ve seen the new film based on it, I feel a strong desire to talk about what I think I’ve seen.

Some poets and writers I deeply respect and have learned from are left cold by this book. They think it is overrated. I know this. I still reread it every other year with deepening admiration.

I'm the sort of reader who should hate any movie based on this book. Nothing can live up the to story in my head.

And when I saw the first promotions, I had my doubts. The music in the promos made the film look more like our century than Fitzgerald’s roaring twenties. Add to this Toby McGuire playing Nick Caraway, and my expectations seemed to drop even lower. 

Reserving Judgment

Even so, I chose to reserve judgment. I'm glad I did because some of my misgivings seemed destined for fulfillment as the movie started. 

First, we should be honest about this. Toby McGuire starts out and remains far too adoring of his subject. In my readings of the novel, Nick Caraway is reserved, critical, even puritanical in his measuring of Jay Gatsby. He seems afraid to get his feet wet.

Not so in this film. McGuire's Nick seems willing to believe Gatsby’s dream, and this is a problem. The narrator is supposed to have this critical distance from his subject.

My second problem concerns the voice-over at the start of the film with what at first appear to be the first lines of the novel. Those first lines are burned in my consciousness. “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.” But after this famous opening, the movie plays fast and slick, reducing Nick’s father’s nuanced, smug advice—“remember, they haven’t had the advantages that you have had”—to “don’t look down on others.”

This is pure pop culture junk. Nuances of Nick’s character are immediately jettisoned in favor of audience identification, and the movie feels in danger to me.

But that is not how things unfold. After the initial tone setting, this movie comes alive—the pacing, except for the middle, is certainly well done. The party scenes somehow seem to straddle both Fitzgerald’s era and our own. The cultural references—the 1919 Black Sox scandal, Kaiser Willhelm, all the jazz—and then all of the costumes and the dancing, root us in an era, and then the modern music layers it gently, bringing our era in. Something intended emerges. There is the gentle suggestion that we recognize what we still do and think.

The Past, the Present

This all begins to work on an uncanny level. When Nick is taken to the party over Wilson’s garage and meets Myrtle, Tom Buchannan’s extra-marital love interest, the focus on the ashes and the workers in that section between East and West Egg and New York makes for an economic comparison in which the wealthy keep getting wealthier while the rest remain in their struggles. This seems an increasingly modern perspective. The excesses, the wealth, the poverty, and the boredom seem contemporary, not just some figment of a romantic past.

And the story—Gatsby’s story—is caught in this, even drives it through his disturbing vision of the past he would repeat. I come to understand that Nick considers Gatsby great, not because of the gaudy empire he has built, but because of his infinite capacity for hope.

So in the end, as the scene fades to the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, and then the dock vanishes and only the green light remains hanging there in the dark, that is what we are left with—the audience staring out at the green light. Gatsby is gone, or a ghost, but there we sit, in the dark, with that green pin point of light for several seconds.This is the light that would link us with Gatsby.

This is what I saw. It seems to me a powerful adaptation that makes something new of Fitzgerald’s novel without doing it violence.

It makes a fitting tribute. I highly recommend it.