The Godfather Returns [Import] [Paperback]

Mark; Puzo, Mario Winegardner (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 538 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books (2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345485246
• ISBN-13: 978-0345485243
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (142 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,453,849 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mark Winegardner was born and raised in Bryan, Ohio, near Exit 2, a town of 8,000 which supplies the world with its Dum-Dum suckers and Etch-a-Sketches. His parents owned an RV dealership there, and every summer he traveled with his family across the USA in various travel trailers and motorhomes. By the time he was 15, he had been in all 48 contiguous states. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from Miami University and went on to receive a master of fine arts degree in fiction writing from George Mason University. He published his first book at age 26, while still in graduate school. He has taught at Miami, George Mason, George Washington, and John Carroll Universities, and is now a professor in the creative writing program at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida.

Winegardner has won grants, fellowships and residencies from the Ohio Arts Council, the Lilly Endowment, the Ragdale Foundation, the Sewanee Writers Conference and the Corporation of Yaddo. His books have been chosen as among the best of the year by the New York Times Book Review, Chicago Sun-Times, Los Angeles Times, the New York Public Library, and USA Today. His work has appeared in GQ, Playboy, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, DoubleTake, Family Circle, The Sporting News, Witness, Story Quarterly, American Short Fiction, Ladies Home Journal, Parents and The New York Times Magazine. Several of his stories have been chosen as Distinguished Stories of the Year in The Best American Short Stories.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars The Corleones aren't the only thieves., December 30, 2004

By 

Brian in LA - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Godfather Returns (Hardcover)

After having been first excited and then disappointed by Godfather III, I approached this book with what I thought was a healthy dose of skepticism. The dose was not healthy enough.

By page 7, Winegardner has already stolen from Goodfellas when describing how Ace Geraci (Winegardner's creation) took over legitimate businesses and used them to have deliveries "stream through the front door and go straight out the back." And then when the bills came to the business, Geraci torches the business. This is almost exactly what happened to the bar in which Henry Hill and his cohorts took an interest.

I should have stopped reading then, but I didn't.

As some other reviewers have written, the "explanation" of Fredo is simply absurd. Had Winegardner ever read The Godfather or seen any of the movies? Nothing in any of the previous works even hints at Fredo being gay or dabbling in acting. Also with "the new and improved" Fredo, we find yet another bit of pilfering from a Scorsese/Pileggi collaboration. Winegardner has Fredo host his own television show from the Corleone's casino in Las Vegas. Didn't we already see that with Ace Rothstein in Casino? Lastly re Fredo, what's the big deal with the cemetery scheme? This is the big explanation as to why he betrayed Michael? Please.

And speaking of "please," Congressman Tom Hagen? Why? Again, why? Where on earth did this come from? Wouldn't someone have made a passing remark about this in either of the last two films? Why put this in? It makes zero sense.

Winegardner also wields his pen to bring the dead back to life, and for what reason, I cannot understand. At the end of The Godfather, Michael clearly has eliminated the other heads of the Five Families. These would include Cuneo and Stracci. Michael even tells of their deaths (among others) to Carlo Rizzo when he gets Rizzo to admit to being part of Barzini's plot to kill Sonny. But, ho! Suddenly, the reader finds both Cuneo and Stracci very much alive, and in roles which could have been filled by characters with other names.

But Winegardner's talents don't stop with raising the dead or butchering well established characters. He also completely eliminates a pivotal character from the second Godfather movie, Frank "Frankie Five Angels" Pentageli. It was Pentangeli who took over for Clemenza. It was Pentangeli who was responsible for Michael having to testify before the US Senate. It was Pentageli's war with the Roasato brothers that was integral to Michael's struggle with Hyman Roth. Yet Winegardner never mentions Pentangeli.

He also allows only a handful of words for the Rosato brothers. In Godfather II Pentageli alludes to the fact that the Rosato brothers had something to do with Clemenza's death, that "that was no heart attack." Yet, again, Winegardner thinks he's more entertaining than Puzo and makes the cause of Clemenza's death... a heart attack. Couldn't he have used any effort to try to use the loose threads from Puzo to weave into his story?

Of course, Winegardner does make the effort to use his present employer, Florida State University, as a setting. Well, at least he has his priorities straight.

I could go on further, but suffice it to say that this book is grossly insulting to anyone who is a fan of mario Puzo's fine works.

I did say fan and not fanatic. Yes, there are many of us who are quite familiar with the original book and the three films. Perhaps we know too much about them. However, Winegardner, in taking on the role of steward of this classic American saga, should have taken the time and made the effort to familiarize himself with these works, and not thought he was better or smarter than their creator.

36 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars stick to the original - ignore Winegardner's version, January 4, 2005

By 

Benjamin M. Miller (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Godfather Returns (Hardcover)

I would give this less than one star if I could.

I was torn when I first saw this book. On the one hand, Mario Puzo wrote a master piece and another author should not just ride his coat tails. But I saw that Winegardner had written a number of other books, and figured he handled this task with the necessary class and research to write the book properly.

Unfortunately I was wrong.

A minor detail, in his acknowledgments he does not even acknowledge Puzo. Also, I found myself wondering when I was on page 300, where was this going. The author had not really developed a new story of any kind. He seemed to be obsessed with sex, and added it to the story when it did not have to be there. Fredo for some reason has become gay, even though his affection for waitresses is well known from the first movie.

Most offensive there are a number of discrepencies between Winegardner's book and Mario Puzo's and the movies. All are minor but in writing such a book, the author should know the movies and the book inside and out. Winegardner did not.

I will admit that I did not finish reading the book. Around page 330 or so, I threw the book across the room in disgust. Winegardner had decided to write that Kay really did not have an abortion, that it was a miscarriage. This was the last straw for me. Winegardner decided to take one of the most powerful scenes from the movie and change it. I could not accept this and had finally had enough.

This is a lazy effort by Winegardner. He throws in a lot of new names and adds plots with Cleveland, Chicago, LA, but never really lets us know any of these new characters or plots. He throws in a lot of lines from the movies, and it is always akward. There is no Frank Pentangeli, no real detail provided for any of the questions that are left by the gaps in the movie. The writer handled how Fredo was set up against his brother in a few paragraphs, without even involving Hyman Roth. The author has Fredo Corleone doing his tv show two days before his death? Is this believable.

I would run away from this book, and if someone gave it to me, I would give it back. Do not waste your time. Read Mario Puzo. Go see the movies. Other than the title and some of the characters, this book by Winegardner has nothing in common with The Godfather.

26 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Solid Attempt at Sleeping with the Fishes, November 17, 2004

By 

Ed Uyeshima (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Godfather Returns (Hardcover)

The daunting task of writing a sequel to Mario Puzo's classic "The Godfather" rests squarely on the shoulders of a writer who won a contest run by Random House, the book's publisher. From this unpromising true-life scenario comes a novel that is well crafted and only marginally disappointing when it comes to its built-in expectations. A writer, even one as obviously talented as Mark Winegardner, unfortunately starts in a creative deficit when his one overriding responsibility amounts to not only supplementing but expanding upon as singular a vision as Puzo's original telling of the Corleone family saga. These characters are so ingrained in the American consciousness that Winegardner's immediate priority is to deal with the burden of remaining faithful to a classic. In a way that highlights the selectiveness of our collective memory, "The Godfather" invented the Mafia, endowing it with a mandolin-strumming legend and pinkie ring-kissing ritual even the actual Mafia didn't know was there.

The story picks up the Corleone story in 1955 right after Michael has proven his mettle among New York's most powerful crime families, and now he wants to claim legitimacy for his family business. So obsessed is he for respect, Michael becomes more and more isolated as a character, and unfortunately, the lack of inner conflict doesn't make for a very dramatic arc since he doesn't undergo any significant transformation in the story. I believe this sort of evolution is what made the first book and its film version resonate. The author instead focuses Michael's attention externally on his deteriorating relationship with Fredo, the weak brother whom we already know is no match for him. In fact, Winegardner fills in a lot of the blanks about Fredo making him a bisexual psychopath who hosts a TV show. He also introduces a street informer named Nick Geraci, who is set up as not only a vengeful competitor but also the yang to Michael's yin. These mostly parallel tracks are interspersed with less important stories that still effectively add texture to the novel - Fredo's efforts to start a cemetery business in New Jersey, the power struggle the Corleones experience in taking over Las Vegas and the West Coast, the incendiary role the family plays in trying to oust Castro from Cuba. Even Johnny Fontane, the veiled alter-ego of Frank Sinatra, comes back in this sequel, as does sister Connie who has become a pretentious jet-setter (instead of the Lady Macbeth figure in Part III of the movie trilogy). Indeed, as with the movie sequels, this book dramatically shows how family dynasties destroy themselves over time.

The main problem with the book has nothing to do with Winegardner's robust writing and everything to do with the iconic status of the Francis Ford Coppola films, even the lackluster third installment. When the author provides his own creative invention to such familiar characters, he seems like he's cheating somehow, veering off course simply because we already feel we know what happened to these characters from the movies. Of course, the comparison to Coppola's grand, operatic epics is unfair but inevitable. Taken on its own terms, however, this is a pretty strong sequel to the potboiler that Puzo's 1969 novel really was - fast, suspenseful, often baroque and lurid. It captures the pulp fiction pitch of the first book without the self-importance attached to the movie version. No small feat. If you can escape this comparison, you'll find this book a very worthwhile read.