The BS Column: All in the family

(Published in the Business Standard, August 18, 2009)

Make me an offer I can’t refuse. Ask me to explain why, 40 years after a boy from Hell’s Kitchen--Italian immigrant, government clerk, hack writer--wrote a book about a squabbling family that settled its feuds with guns, we’re still reading The Godfather.

My first copy of Mario Puzo’s fourth and most successful book was pre-censored; one of the many readers who’d borrowed it from the local library had neatly razored out the scene where Sonny Corleone and the bridesmaid get it on, a few other mildly pornographic sections, and the famous scene where a businessmen who turns down an offer he shouldn’t have refused wakes up to find his horse’s severed head on the bedsheets.

A few months later, reading an unabridged version, I had to admire the bowdleriser’s impeccable sense of the book’s high points—the unknown wielder of the blade had also exercised the quietly drawn scene where Don Corleone dies, not struck down by a hail of bullets, but in relative peace, a Mafia don seeing death among the tomato plants.

By Puzo’s own admission, The Godfather was not intended to be high literature. He had aspirations to literary writing, though. The best book Puzo ever wrote had come out three years previously; The Runaway Summer of Davie Shaw remains one of the strangest and most compelling evocations of growing up, a child’s book by an adult who had not forgotten what it felt like to think like a child. That book remains in print, but Puzo made his bones and his reputation with The Godfather.

He’d spent a decade hacking out adventure stories, payment by the word, for True Action magazine, in between living a clerk’s life, and he’d seen three books—The Dark Arena, The Fortunate Pilgrim and Davie Shaw—published to general indifference. He intended his fourth book to be a commercial success, and said famously that if he’d known it was going to an enduring as well as financial success, he would have written it better. It’s remained iconic, the automatic point of comparison for any other novel or film featuring the Mafia, organised crime, violence and murder. And over time, its weaknesses—the bald, unembellished story-telling, the quick introduction of characters—have been overcome by its strengths, the compelling central story, the tightly woven plot.

But there are two points of great interest about The Godfather. The 1960s yielded a clutch of bestsellers that have endured the ravages of time. Much to the dismay of literary purists, we’re still reading James Michener, Irving Wallace, Ian Fleming and Harold Robbins, to mention some of the popular pulp fiction authors of the day. But there’s a massive difference between the reading habits of the 1960s and 1970s, and the reading habits of the 1990s and the 2000s.

Today’s bestseller lists are, and have been for the last two-three decades, over-run by the professionals—pulp and popular fiction writers like Danielle Steele, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, John Grisham, Patricia Cornwell. Once in a very long while, a Salman Rushdie or Umberto Eco breaks through the ranks of the branded pulp writer, but they are the exceptions rather than the rule. Back in the 1960s, when The Godfather came out, pulp writers shared space with some of the finest literary writers of the time—J D Salinger, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow held their own in the popularity stakes. And it’s interesting to note that The Godfather comes in at number two on the list of 1960s bestsellers—not number one.

The other point is that Puzo himself didn’t see The Godfather as a book about crime and violence and the Mafia. He saw it as a book about the family: business is just business, something you shouldn’t take personal, but betrayal of family ties, loyalty to the family, the upholding of family values—these are the strongest and most insistent themes of The Godfather. Italian-Americans have had a complex relationship with the book, but for readers across the world, The Godfather is beloved in part because it is the saga of the classic large, warm and utterly dysfunctional family. (Small wonder that Puzo has so many fans in India, where the Corleones, with a few tiny shifts, could so easily be the Capoors.)

As a final aside, the book that outsold The Godfather was also about a man from immigrant America, torn by guilt because of his complex relationship with his parents, rendered practically impotent by the grinding and contradictory demands of the family versus his personal freedom. The number one bestseller of the 1960s was Philip Roth’s classic Portnoy’s Complaint—a book that in a very different way from The Godfather, but with similar intensity, features a renegade son in search of a solution to his problems. Michael Corleone finds his by taking over the reins of the “family business”; Alexander Portnoy finds his on the psychoanalyst’s couch, and forty years down the line, we still read both in search of our own answers.

The Other Side of Sidney

Published in the Business Standard, February 05, 2007)


At the age of 17, depressed at his growing collection of rejection slips, certain that he would never become a writer, Sidney Sheldon tried to commit suicide. His father walked in on him just before he took a combination of sleeping pills and bourbon whisky, and quietly talked him out of it.

If Mr Schechtel—Sheldon changed his surname during his Hollywood years, to make it more “saleable”—had been less persuasive, the literary world may not have missed out on much. Sidney Sheldon, who died this week, would have been the first to agree that his prose was readable rather than deathless, that his bestsellers were written to keep readers rather than critics up all night. But an entire generation of Indians brought up in more repressive times would have had much more trouble figuring out the birds and bees without “Sidney ke kitab”.

We read his books furtively; copies were passed from hand-to-hand and fell open obligingly at the saucy bits. This was in a relatively innocent age when the Indian taste in bestsellers ran to Alistair Maclean (who never wrote about sex because he felt it slowed down the action), James Hadley Chase (who should have been called Chaste because the well-endowed babe on the book cover was about as exciting as it got) and Desmond Bagley.

Pulp fiction, barring Nick Carter’s risibly lurid concoctions, was remarkably clean in those days. Sidney Sheldon’s books, from The Other Side of Midnight to The Windmills of the Gods, seem almost sweetly old-fashioned to contemporary eyes. But they were greatly prized for the steamy bits in that time, though today any self-respecting Mills & Boon is anatomically more explicit—and more accurate!—than Sheldon’s harmless page-turners. He had quite a following among women readers in Calcutta for a strange reason—many assumed that “Sidney” was a woman, and treated him/ her as a superior romance writer.

The interesting thing about Sidney Sheldon is that he represented a generation of popular fiction writers who have endured. This is disconcerting for the highbrow reader, who knows that one of the ways in which you recognize a “classic” is if the book lasts over several generations. If that is true, then a case must be made for a kind of alternate, mass-market “classic”, and this, to many, would devalue an already debased word.

The original “bestsellers” make a reassuring list for those readers who believe in literary value and in the idea that quality writing will make a place for itself in the world. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for example, is a classic of medieval literature—but it was also a runaway bestseller in its day. The first printed book to be accounted bestseller status was Thomas a Kempis’ De Imitatione Christi, a rousing, controversial and deeply scholarly work. Most bestsellers in medieval Europe would fit into a modern-day “spirituality” imprint: Martin Luther’s Sermons were hugely popular, as were the lives of the saints, collections of sermons, and editions of separate books of the Bible, conveniently packaged for the reader who wanted only to read, say, Psalms or the Apocrypha.

An early indication that the nature of the bestseller might shift over time came in 1532 with the great Italian romantic epic, Orlando Furioso. That prepared the way for slightly later popular successes, such as Tristram Shandy--an early example of the cult novel—or Richardson’s three-volume novels. The American publishing world initially displayed a reassuring popular appetite for what was seen as quality literary fiction—James Fenimore Cooper and Nathaniel Hawthorne were the top sellers of their day, for instance.

But there was a fairly rapid shift towards the bestseller as we know it today. A typical early success was The Lamplighter, a domestic novel written by Maria Cummins. It was a sentimental, melodramatic account of a maltreated orphan who is rescued, only to have her faith tested across the rest of an apparently interminable book. The prose was slushy when it wasn’t saccharine, but the book sold 20,000 copies in less than a month.

The Lamplighter reassures readers who believe that quality will ultimately win the day. Twenty years after its publication, it was on its way to oblivion, and few remember it today. But if you look at the bestseller lists for the 20th century, some names have remained steady sellers for close to four or five decades: Wilbur Smith, Frederick Forsyth, early Robert Ludlum, early Sidney Sheldon. In all these cases, the storylines and plots seem dated, what was once shocking is now mildly quaint. But the books still sell, and if they don’t die over the next few decades, we may have to redefine what we mean by a “classic”.