The Godfather by Mario Puzo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
It’s amazing to me that this work is Mario Puzo’s “sell out work” as it is Coppola’s. It’s arguable that neither writer nor director ever topped this story.
What you get here is a re-centering of family values for the purposes of resource accumulation. Don Corleone’s ability to position himself at the nexus of exchange (promising use-value for one side and then for the other) in the form of favors is exactly the kind of personalized economic exchange that our consumer oriented economy wants. Do you have a problem? Here’s the fix. Only instead of often doing this with money, Corleone does this with personal clout. His ability to manage people, to appear as uncontingent (without display of emotion, without giving away what he is thinking) extends from the lowliest common baker to the highest politicians in Washington. This is the frightening circle that he draws, absolute loyalty to him, in the guise of personal friendship. In fact, Michael experiences this when he goes into the old world, where Puzo explains the rise of the costa nostra as a society within society, where the mafia unifies its social regime in the underbelly of the “legit” government, which oppressed its people far too much. This doubling of governance occurs when the legit government needs to appear clean, and in this sense, the mafia is part of the social arrangement of the legit government, because the legit government can only do so much to forestall social unrest while keeping its hands clean. You see this happening with policemen who take grifts and small time bribes. You see with Puzo that attraction of violent men like Negri and McCluskey and Luca have to this underbelly world, where they are able to interact with a strange code of ethics, one that is enforced with violence and deep appraisals of character.
It’s significant as well that the Corleone family understands the need to blend in and become legit like the Americas, that Michael by defying his father was in fact following orders, to be more American. He understood though, that the time was not yet, and thus joined his father in this world. His wife Kay’s separation and then reconciliation too, bespeaks of this unofficial alliance between legitimacy and violence. In this sense, the ideology of American society runs throughout this book, as understood by both its detractors and its fans. Immigrants here want the goodness of American society, but they bring with it, so you can read, a violence and un-Americanness that needs to be contained, to be kept, because Americans are wary of immigrants, so immigrants must fend for themselves and adhere to a kind of quasi-justice that is a mixture of cleanness and decent folk and the violent enjoyment of the Other. Incidentally, this fundamental separation, this duality of ideology is what makes The Godfather completely racist even as Puzo is able to spell out an alternate economy, an economic exchange that binds the underbelly of American society into a thing that can be marketed bought and sold.
Although there are stereotypes all over this book, Puzo surprises me with his depth of understanding, his attention to characterization and his monolithic vision of life at the top of a mafia regime. Definitely worth the read, if you are interested in exploring this kind of alternate social arrangement.
