Out of the Old Pirogue

By Martha Duffy

THE CONDOR PASSES by Shirley Ann Grau. 421 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

Novels resembling The Godfather are to be expected these days, but it is certainly a surprise to see one from Shirley Ann Grau.

This one starts out by recounting the rapacious career of one Thomas Oliver, who was born in an Ohio River town in 1870. At 13 he left home, and by 17 he was prospering as a pickpocket, pimp and smuggler. After another ten years of wandering, he winds up down the river in New Orleans. His first big money comes from running whorehouses, though the early jazz-band accompaniments nearly drive his tin ears crazy. Prohibition bootlegging eventually accounts for his real power and fortune. While it must be said that Oliver is not Italian, his partners are called Manzini and Lamotta, and he marries into a thriving Sicilian clan. Gradually, all the standard gangland props are assembled: henchmen, reprisals, shootouts at the warehouse, payoffs and protection rackets. The author even seems to have anticipated the recent caveats of the Italian-American Civil Rights League: the world Mafia is missing. Indeed, when his wife dies, leaving only two daughters, Oliver "adopts" a handsome young Cajun named Robert Caillet, cuts him in on the business, and literally railroads him into marriage with his older daughter Anna.

By this time the Old Man has been transmogrified into a wise and mellow padrone, and the story shifts a generation. Daughter Anna inherits her mother s masochism; her sister Margaret gets her father's greed. As for Robert, he drinks, chases women and wonders what the Old Man ever saw in him. The reader can only agree.

Even Shirley Ann Grau's best novel, The Hard Blue Sky, is very casually plotted. But she can write with a poet's concentration and record dialect knowingly. Perhaps The Condor Passes is merely an attempt to join the mainstream--as the South is now supposed to be doing--and to market all that distilled violence nationally. Still, there is richer life in the bayous than in the mainstream. One can only hope that she will soon be back in her old pirogue.

Martha Duffy

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