An Offer You Can Refuse

Despite the fact that Mario Puzo sleeps with the fishes and has been been doing so since 1999, this week brings us a brand-new novel set in the rich, bloody, curiously seductive world of the original, pre-Sopranos gangsters, the Corleone family. Just when we thought we were out — say it with me — they pull us back in.

The Godfather Returns (Random House; 430 pages), by the non-Sicilian Mark Winegardner, is not precisely a sequel; it's interleaved into the gaps between the three movies. We rejoin Michael Corleone still struggling to take the family business legitimate while ignoring the slow collapse of his marriage. For reasons that are never very clear, Michael tries and fails to assassinate an ambitious Corleone street soldier named Nick Geraci, who then becomes his rival and nemesis. As plots go, it's a little thin, and Winegardner doesn't have much of a feel for Michael. Al Pacino played him as a tragic Mafia genius, a dormant volcano of repressed emotion, but here he's just an icy, hypercompetent sociopath.

Winegardner has to look far and wide to find bits of the picture that Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola haven't already colored in, and as a result the novel is a bit of a grab bag. We follow the later careers of consigliereTom Hagen, who becomes a politician in Nevada, and singer Johnny Fontane, who, like Frank Sinatra, "helped transform Las Vegas ... into the fastest growing city in the United States." We also see more of Michael's sad-sack brother Fredo Corleone, who turns out to be a self-hating bisexual, and — in case you cared — the late Sonny Corleone's daughter Francesca.

This is mostly human-interest stuff — The Godfather Returns is more cannolis than guns. The original book was gorgeously pulpy and trashy; it was only on film that it became a work of high art. (Like Michael, Coppola was the one who tried to take the family legitimate.) Winegardner may have gone too far in that direction; his Godfather feels prim and cultured. There's not enough blood and wine in its veins, or on the walls for that matter. It's too personal — what happened to strictly business?