November 19, 2006
The Consigliere
By MICHAEL AGGER

THE GODFATHER’S REVENGE
By Mark Winegardner.

Say what you will about the Mafia, it’s an organization that knows how to elegantly dispose of a corpse. Mark Winegardner, not a Sicilian but an English professor, has written two sequels to Mario Puzo’s “Godfather.” The first was a jumble of Cuba scenes, betrayal and Michael Corleone’s eternal desire to become a legitimate businessman. It’s memorable mostly for angering readers with its “gay Fredo” revelation (an entirely plausible deduction from the movies). Now, with “The Godfather’s Revenge,” a once-amusing idea is starting to assume a necrophiliac air. For how many more pages can Michael, Kay, Tom and Johnny Fontane keep this stuff up? And don’t they ever get to leave the ’60s behind?

Winegardner sets his new novel determinedly in that era, when the Kennedys, the Mafia and Frank Sinatra burned brightly in the American imagination — a safe and unsatisfying decision. In the wake of “The Sopranos” and “The Wire,” the book feels like a visit to a Mafia version of Colonial Williamsburg: watch the women make manicotti, while the men plot and sulk in the dark.

Recreating Puzo’s embroidered Mafia universe can be entertaining, and Winegardner has rich (in every sense of the word) material to work with. Name another movie that half the world can quote ... besides “Star Wars” and “Casablanca” and “The Wizard of Oz.” Despite this inherited advantage, Winegardner writes like a low-level soldier who never fails to mention his connections to the more powerful. “The Godfather’s Revenge” cruises through a few scenes of double-dealing and then invariably drops some thundering reference to scenes mostly remembered from the Francis Ford Coppola movies. When Johnny Fontane and Francesca Corleone stroll in the moonlight, for instance, they end up flirting on top of the grave of Khartoum, the racehorse whose head showed up in “The Godfather.” This made me want to put down the book and go watch the original scene on YouTube.

“The Godfather’s Revenge” takes an extended journey into the mind of Tom Hagen, the Corleone consigliere, and continues the original story of Nick Geraci, a traitorous Corleone underboss determined to push aside Michael and take his job. Nick is somewhat unbelievable. He’s a wiseguy in search of a Renaissance Weekend — give this man a pay phone and he will orchestrate a few hits and then go home and work on his memoir while struggling with his Parkinson’s and keeping trim as a boxer and hiding from his mortal enemies. Tom merely gets into trouble with his wife after his mistress turns up dead. The novel also features cameos from the athletic, philandering Shea brothers, who are Winegardner’s stand-ins for Jack and Bobby.

The stories of these tradition-bound men are told with economy and a pulpy flair. There’s just one problem: these men are not Michael, who makes only shadowy and inconclusive appearances in the book. That’s an astounding choice. Why drive a Fiat when you have a Ferrari in the garage? Michael is a character who moves between good and evil, who killed his own brother, who longs for legitimacy and power. He’s a successful Hamlet, one who can dress well and act when pushed.

The great attraction of Puzo’s and Coppola’s “Godfather” was the romantic notion that a criminal code of honor, based on family, could persist in the modern era. When Winegardner delves into how all the world is like a Mafia, his book feels right, as in the scene with Michael envying the set-up of Robert Moses, who collects kickbacks from the public works he oversees, yet is hailed as a civic hero. Too often, though, the book just wants to rub shoulders with every historical moment it can, including the ultimate: the Kennedy assassination. Sure, the Corleones can be a hidden hand in history, but their power was always balanced by and rooted in a ritualistic family life. This is where Winegardner fails to innovate, and his confection falls flat. After all, a man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.