Mark Winegardner, author of the sequel tp Mario Puzo's 'The Godfather', tells Anna Mundow that the essential Mafia myth is still relevant
Thirty-five years ago, Mario Puzo's The Godfather was published and the Mafia myth was born. Respectable citizens who couldn't find New Jersey on the map started saying "Make him an offer he can't refuse" and talking like "made guys". Then Francis Ford Coppola's three Godfather movies - released in 1972, 1974 and 1990 respectively - enlarged the mobster world later revisited in Martin Scorcese's Goodfellas (based on Nicholas Pileggi's novel Wiseguys) and, most recently, in The Sopranos.
Puzo was a struggling writer in his mid-40s when he accepted the $5,000 advance from Putnam to write The Godfather. The book sold 20 million copies, but, even though his subsequent novels failed to capture the popular imagination in the same way, Puzo rejected the idea of a sequel. "He was a gambler at heart," Jonathan Karp, Puzo's editor for more than a decade, recalled in a recent Barnes & Noble interview, "and he realised that a sequel would have been a bad percentage move for him. It was bound to pale in comparison."
Puzo died in 1999, leaving behind a partially completed novel about the Borgias, called The Family, and his blessing on a sequel. "After I croak," as Puzo put it, Karp could do as he wished with The Godfather.
Last year, Karp, now an editorial director at Random House, began the search for a sequel writer. His letter to a dozen literary agents, and the media hype surrounding the quest triggered a huge response. Mark Winegardner, however, was sceptical. "I rang Karp and said 'Tell me the truth. At the end of the day you'll get a famous crime writer for this, right?'" Karp insisted that he was looking for a literary novelist; Winegardner submitted a 10-page proposal and was chosen to write The Godfather: The Lost Years, was published in the US under the title of The Godfather Returns.
In Karp's view, it was a perfect match. "Puzo's greatest literary inspiration was Dostoyevsky, who taught him to see the humanity within the villainous," he said. "Mark Winegardner has an equally big heart when writing about his characters, and this can be very interesting when you're going to have to kill a lot of them."
Winegardner, the 41-year-old director of the creative writing programme at Florida State University, had rarely murdered a character; but this burly man, who could be mistaken for an out-of-shape boxer, had introduced some tough personalities and memorable violence into his earlier work. Baseball legend Babe Ruth appears in his first novel, Veracruz Blues, and John F. Kennedy in his second, Crooked River Burning. "Both novels were written through the lens of historical fact," he observes. "The Godfather Returns is the same in that sense, except that the existing characters are from Puzo's novel."
Re-reading The Godfather and watching Coppola's movies again, Winegardner immediately saw where his sequel should go. "The emotional core of The Godfather is Michael Corleone's desire to make the business legitimate, and that is utterly unresolved in the movie. Then there's Tom Hagen's relationship with the family; that goes nowhere."
IN THE GODFATHER: The Lost Years, which opens in 1955, Michael plans to turn the Corleone enterprises into legitimate businesses while Tom Hagen, the family lawyer, embarks on a political career. Envisioning ". . . utter control of Cuba and access to the White House and even the Vatican", Michael is determined that "before long they could . . . operate in the open, indistinguishable from any of the master criminals known collectively to suckers everywhere as the Fortune 500".
Writing in a dry, deadpan style that permits itself few literary flourishes yet powerfully evokes the five decades it spans (the early life of Vito Corleone from 1910 to 1939 is also covered in flashbacks), Winegardner develops, in particular, the characters of Johnny Fontane, the Sinatra figure; of Fredo Corleone, whose death is finally explained here; of Francesca, Sonny Corleone's daughter; and of Michael's wife, Kay, who learns the truth about her husband and is forced to pronounce judgment on their marriage.
In addition to reanimating Puzo's characters, Winegardner snakes his narrative through the gaps left between the movies Godfather and Godfather II (1954-1958) and between Godfather II and III (1959-1962). He also did his homework.
"Puzo famously said there was nothing about the Mafia that he didn't learn in the New York Public Library," Winegardner laughs. "He mostly relied on newspaper archives. I had it easier. Now there's a whole wing of that library filled with books about the Mafia."
After consulting more than 100 of those books and reading numerous FBI wiretap transcripts of mobster conversations ("disappointing"), Winegardner visited Sicily where Felice Cavalarro, one of Italy's leading journalists on the subject of the Mafia, showed him, among other things, "where Lucky Luciano lived; where the bodies are buried, literally."
Winegardner avoided watching The Sopranos - "That's Mafia Nouveau; this is Mafia Classic" - and chose not to interview mobsters, who, he contends, typically "inflate what they've done or won't talk at all". Most importantly, Winegardner infused The Godfather: The Lost Years with his exquisite perception of the most mundane details and with his laconically graceful language, qualities that made his last book, That's True of Everybody, one of America's finest recent short story collections.
Those powers of observation were nurtured early on. Winegardner was born in Bryan, Ohio, an industrial town of 8,000 where his parents owned a motor-home dealership. Every summer the family hit the road; by age 15, he had visited all 48 contiguous states.
Two baseball books - Prophet of the Sandlot: Journeys with a Major-League Scout (1990) and The 26th Man: One Major League Pitcher's Pursuit of a Dream (1991) - preceded his first novel, Veracruz Blues (1996), which was also about baseball. Crooked River Burning and That's True of Everybody were published in 2001 and critics began comparing Winegardner to John Dos Passos and E. L. Doctorow.
His own extensive list of admired writers ranges from Philip Roth to relative newcomer Elwood Reid, novelists who are also unapologetically at home in America.
"What makes up the American mythology, that's what interests me," Winegardner says, "and, like the Western, the Mafia is a core American myth."
He traces this widespread fascination back not only Puzo's novel and Coppola's movies but also to Vietnam and to Watergate. "When your government looks like the enemy, the local mob guy - who doesn't kill anyone without a reason - looks pretty good," he observes. "After all, more innocent people will die in Iraq than have been killed in the entire history of the mob."
WINEGARDNER DOES NOT, however, romanticise his wiseguys. The Godfather: The Lost Years opens with a murder and has its share of vicious psychopaths. But Winegardner also inserts his own loves - baseball, music, Cleveland - and a sublimely awful character who is clearly based on Joseph Kennedy. At a poolside meeting, Tom Hagen notes with disgust that the naked Ambassador's ". . . skin was the color of rare prime rib. His chest and back were hairless as a fetal pig's."
Such quotes deserve the immortality that Puzo's instantly earned, but, even in the middle of a hectic book tour, Mark Winegardner is sanguine about success.
"I have file drawers bulging with false starts and with two whole novels that lots of people pretended to like - liars. those books sucked - so my first novel, Veracruz Blues, was really my third . . . Novelists are the kind of people who, to paraphrase Beckett, learn how to fail better."
Not this time. With Winegardner's Godfather circling the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic, he admits that his "days of showing up . . . to read somewhere in Minnesota, and there are only four fans there, are over".
That pleases him because he insists that, 35 years later - even with John Gotti "the last don" dead and Gotti's daughter starring in her own reality television show - the essential Mafia myth is still relevant.
"Back in 1972, The Godfather's anti-heroic myth was perfect for a country reeling from Vietnam and Watergate. And, as far as I can see, our country continues to reel. 'Leave the gun, take the canoli' is still very good advice."
The Godfather: The Lost Years is published by Random House (£16.99)