One Man's Family

THE GODFATHER, by Mario Puzo. 446 pages. Putnam. $6.95.

Although the last word on this robust, casually served novel about the Mafia should come from the voluble Joe Valachi, the moral will be evident to a jaywalker: The Family That Preys Together Stays Together.

A corollary lesson is that crime pays--or, to quote Mario Puzo quoting Honore de Balzac: "Behind every great fortune there is a crime." When Puzo gets around to updating Balzac's ever so slight overstatement, he has the youngest and smartest son of the oldest and smartest New York Mafia boss tell his lank Yankee bride: "In my history course at Dartmouth we did some background on all the Presidents and they had fathers and grandfathers who were lucky they didn't get hanged."

As usual, after money and power are secured, the name of the game is respectability and status. The Godfather, which advances and contracts suggest should earn its author at least $500,000 in royalties, paperback and film rights, could prove a subtle opening move in getting the Mafia into the same league as the House of Lords and the German General Staff.

To begin with, Puzo avoids the opera buffa nicknames that newspaper rewrite men use to lend a tint of life to their gangster stories. Secondly, Puzo's Corleone family has manly standards. Gambling, labor extortion, an occasional unavoidable murder and some judicious bribery are all in order. But no prostitution or drugs. These enterprises offend the strait-laced sensibility of the Godfather, Don Vito Corleone.

As a young Sicilian immigrant and hard-working family man in New York's Little Italy, Don Vito discovered (somewhat to his own surprise) he was "a man of force." The phrase is recurrent and a key to understanding the qualities that distinguish a true captain of business and industry. Don Vito is the sort of man who would undoubtedly grump at such academic non sequiturs as "political science," since the years have taught him there is no greater natural advantage in life than having an enemy overestimate one's faults.

Arrayed before Don Vito like vassals at a feudal court are scores of coarsegrained characters who provide the sub-and sub-subplots that enable Puzo to illustrate the broad reach of the Godfather's influence. It is a mark of his power that he commands fierce loyalties because he treats his petitioners with respect--though they range from an obscure paisano seeking revenge for a damaged daughter to a famous Italian-American crooner who needs help to branch out into acting and producing.

Puzo had to do a great deal of inflating to blow his book up to the proportions of a bestselling beach ball. Yet he keeps it spinning brightly--if somewhat unevenly--with a crisp, dramatic narrative style. His professional skill is not surprising. Puzo, 48, learned what keeps a reader turning pages by freelancing and editing adventure magazines. Many of his Mafia anecdotes, he claims, come from his 81-year-old Italian mother. Puzo's own Mafia connections are strictly social. He enjoys frequent jaunts to the Mafia-backed gambling dens in the Bahamas. That he should thus leave some of the royalty money with the very people whom he good-naturedly exploited to get it is the sort of justice that would surely content the Godfather.

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