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161 12 Mario Puzo and Me In this article about Mario Puzo’s post-Godfather success, Krim’s sense of failure is growing and that failure is multilayered. He did not make the big money, but that is not the worst of it. He also did not develop a mature personality. He feels he isn’t hardboiled, tough, and the implication is clear that his debilitating tenderness has something to do with a disemboweled Jewish culture. But Krim, steeped in American literature, also touches on a theme central to the American novel: the relationship between the wide-eyed and the realist. The bildungsroman or coming-of-age story is a pillar of the novel, but in contemporary America the genre has been given a twist by casting middle-aged men as the maturing heroes. Over the last century, the day of reckoning in American novels has been continually postponed. Huck Finn was an adolescent. Ishmael was college-aged. The Great Gatsby ends with Nick Carraway’s thirtieth birthday. Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog was forty. Krim here is a superannuated Ishmael, a middle-aged Huck Finn, and the essay questions American romanticism and finds much to admire in realism. “Ah Mario, buddy New Yorker, fellow patriot, what a virgin boy I still am in my 50-year-old casing compared to yourself!” M ario Puzo is only two years older than I am, but it sometimes seems like a hundred, and I don’t mean that in the sense in which Mario put himself down for appearing physically aged when he had that nightclub face-off with the suntanned Frank Sinatra in Hollywood. I felt this difference in real, inner, human time when I read The Godfather. Mario talks about having “a thousand years of illiterate Neapolitan peasants” behind him, but whatever the head start he got in actual life and not moony theory it gives him a weight and an understanding of 162 . Missing a Beat cunning that makes me feel like an American Jewish boy scout whenever I read him. Where are my 4,000 years of superior wisdom? It’s a myth, I tell you. Like so many middle-class “reformed” Jews, I wiped the ancient Hebrew out of myself to become an American, a newborn babe of Democracy, and Mario has so far become a much more effective American than myself by plunging unashamedly into the pasta and coming out with red, white, and blue all over his napkin. He craved his life as if it were a fantastic meal even when it hurt the heart out of him; I ducked mine, intellectualized it, idealized it, and now at 50 I fly to London over the Christmas break to gamble my fantasies at the tables and in the streets, and right now I’m sitting in Mario’s hotel rooms (two and a half) like a sensitive boy while he plays heavy pinochle with the two men who own the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas. My father’s kind of pinochle. I watch Mario as if I’m watching fate. We grew up 70-odd blocks from each other, we were each the sons of immigrants, but my people worriedly spared me every bruise they could except the major one of dying on me when I was barely 10 while Mario’s threw him out on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen and fed him with rough love and pasta after each day’s excitement . And didn’t die, wouldn’t dream of it. Mario writes about his early days in The Fortunate Pilgrim (1965) with strength, with too much rosy sentiment for my taste, but with such unabashed warmth and appreciation that you’d think we grew up on different planets instead of in the same city at the same exact time. I write about mine in Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer (1961) with hurt and bitterness, with frailty, with a kind of driving hysteria and enthusiasm and the pace of a stowaway on a rocketship trying to keep his head from blowing off. How could we be so different? We eager sons of immigrants? We new Americans, and for all I know the way things are going, we last Americans as well? Mario is tender to me in the hotel room, almost as if he understood his advantages in the world of gravity. He is built closer to the ground than I am, with a huge gut, naked and glistening in the pinochle lamplight...

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