But in The Last Don (496 pages. Random House. $25), the Corleones simply don’t exist. Instead, Puzo has toggled up another Mafia clan, the Clericuzios, with another paterfamilias who spends the book biding his time and dispatching his minions to Vegas and Hollywood from a walled estate on Long island. A quarter century of inflation has made the old Corleone family fortune seem like chump change; the Clericuzios burn down a $12 million villa at the family casino in Vegas just to get rid of some bloodstains. Hey, they’ve got six others on the property, not to mention “the exclusive penthouse suite.” Can they raise $10 billion to buy a film studio? No sweat. “You don’t understand how big money works,” a mob financier explains. “It’s like whipped cream, you get a small amount and whip it up into a big froth with bonds, loans, stock shares.”
Wiseguys using metaphors out of Julia Child? Well, Puzo’s moves do include some belletristic hip fakes. He lobs us slow-pitch allusions-the casino is called Xanadu, a lawyer is named Molly Flanders-and he gives the moribund don his doppelganger, a moribund movie mogul. There’s even a suicidal novelist moping about the death of the novel. is Puzo fishing for compliments? If so, he should have fixed up the comma-spliced sentences and done something-God knows what- about those love scenes. “It seemed that all the cells of his brain and body flew out and he was left in some feverish dream; he was a ghost whose wisps were filled with ecstasy.”
With energy and imagination, pop fiction can transcend such silliness-“The Godfather” did. But in the “The Last Don,” it’s a weary trudge from one long-foreseen plot point to the next. Hours of reading time seem to go by before a movie star’s stalker ex-husband finally gets whacked by the “good’ Clericuzio; the Corleones would’ve had him sleeping with the fishes in a New York minute -and then blackmailed her instead of falling in love. We think we’re finally getting to something dangerous when a crooked senator asks the Clericuzios to hit the president. The “bad” Clericuzio is up for it; the old don thinks it’s too scary and gets huffy about the insult to his patriotism-and that’s the last we hear of that. A hungrier novelist would whip that dollop of plot up into afroth of complications-or bag it if he didn’t mean to make it pay off. So fans of “The Godfather” should start lowering their expectations: “The Last Don” is just one more book apparently written to be gulped, not savored. Which is not the crime of the century. But it’s not what we were hoping for.
