Mario Puzo's Favorite Writer and a Case of Missing Faith

While visiting my daughter in Iowa this past Christmas break, I got the chance to see some old movies with my oldest daughter Rachel. For one, she had insisted that we watch The Godfather. She had never seen it before and decided it was time to watch it with me. For New Years Eve, we also watched The Poseidon Adventure, another movie from 1972. Both movies hold up surprisingly well in terms of dramatic tension. Neither, of course, passes the Bechdel Test* for good female characters.

When it came out, The Godfather was mostly seen as a potboiler. It was rife with the requisite sex and violence, and it made Mario Puzo, the author of the bestselling book on which the movie was based and also an author who wanted to be taken seriously as a novelist, a lot of money.

I hadn’t seen The Godfather since the 1970s. This time around, I noticed a pattern I hadn’t picked up on before, and it reminded me of what I once read about Mario Puzo: his favorite writer was Dostoyevsky. As an epigraph to his first novel, Puzo even used a famous quotation attributed to Dostoyevsky’s character Father Zosima: “Fathers and teachers, I ponder, what is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”

I mention this because as I watched The Godfather with my daughter, I was struck by some parallel lines to Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, which I read later in the 1970s when I was in college. In that book, the three brothers K are the offspring of different mothers. The oldest son, Dmitri, is passionate and dangerously uncontrollable. Ivan, the second son, is rational and an atheist. The third, Alyosha, is a monk.

There are three brothers also in Puzo’s story, and they share similarities with the Karamazov boys, though the overlay here is not perfect: the oldest, Sonny, is passionate and explosive in a destructive way—like the oldest Karamazov brother. The second brother, Fredo, is weak and childlike. The third, Michael, is rational and becomes, by the movie’s end, very cold and distant.

Again, the parallels are not perfect. The birth order in Puzo’s novel does not follow the birth order in the earlier novel. And while there are the representations of both passion and rationality, there seems no one with a devout faith—only an echo of something muted in Fredo that is not faith but might be rendered as something like a childlikeness or a softness that sometimes gets passed off as faith. A weak son who cannot function in the dark world of the Corleones, Fredo is sent off to Las Vegas to stay with “friends of the family” where he entertains people socially and makes sure their drinks are always filled and they are always happy. This is his role in the story, where the childlike qualities can only be rendered as ineffectualness.

At the start of Dostoyevsky’s novel, Alyosha has been living in a monastery. He plans to stay there, until his mentor, Father Zosima, instructs him to go out into the world. Though Alyosha moves through the story trying to find his way after he has left the cloistered life, suddenly caught up in the push, pull, and manipulations of his contemporaries, he does eventually emerge as a person of service to others.

This is not so much the case with Fredo, who can’t really handle conflict and in his weakness is merely a frail, broken version of his brothers. He is not religious. But if we read the parallel in terms of what is missing, could it be possible to see how Puzo imagines religion in a world of power and crime as an absence, as childishness and weakness?

This could be one contrast between Puzo’s vision and his favorite writer’s: in a world built only on the will to power, the life of faith doesn’t really exist; or if it does, it can only be rendered as ineffective and childish. This contrast accompanies the other one between these characters, and that is found in the differing visions of the rational son. Where Ivan Karamazov, the skeptical and rational brother, experiences a mental breakdown at the end of the novel, Michael Corleone, in The Godfather, emerges as the new Godfather who will lead the family effectively into the future.

There is more here to unpack. There is the way that the weak look to their Godfather- strong man for protection and peace. We could look at this not only in fiction but also, relevantly, in our current political culture, where this pattern of the need for a Superman seems similar to the emergence of Donald Trump as a popular political leader in some circles, a pattern well documented in books like Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne. In a world where our views are brushed aside as childish or weak, we choose a strongman who will battle in the arena where we cannot enter.

I have a lot of trouble accepting what seems to be Puzo’s vision of religious belief as weakness. As a friend recently noted (he is an atheist), people like Mother Theresa are strong and admirable. He also admires and is attracted to Jesus. But I would like to suggest that fictional representations, especially among religious writers, might take up these same themes in their work and imagine a different way to seeing faith in positive, effective terms.

Anyway, these were my thoughts watching this movie again. I wouldn’t blame anyone for accusing me of taking it too seriously. After all, it ranked with the bestsellers of its time, right up there with the novels of Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Suzanne.

But in spite of the obviousness of this movie’s nihilistic conclusions, the echoes I’m talking about are there in the story, if we see them in terms of the Puzo’s favorite novel, which he read, reread, and quoted from.

My thesis is this: In what was widely considered a popular novel at the time, there are some representations, not only of violence (the horse’s head and the “offer they can’t refuse”), but also of spiritual emptiness that might be haunting and even worth some time spent reflecting on. This might be worthwhile for writers during this season of Lent, especially given the direction that so much of our political culture seems to be taking.

Again, for what I’m suggesting, we might need to get past that scene with the movie producer and the horse’s head.

Thank you for reading. We are past the Super Bowl and Valentine’s Day now, and I hope that where you are you are seeing signs of spring. Stay healthy, and stay in touch.

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*The Bechdel Test for movies has three criteria: 1) there are two female characters who have names who 2) talk to each other 3) about other things than the men in the movie. Most movies fail the test.