Well... at some point I realized: I don't think I ever finished the book back in the early 90's. I'm glad I finally got to it, I've finished it. All is well.
I'm assuming that the book was so much like the movie, I kind of didn't see the point and moved on. And yet, I figured out why I thought I'd made up a scene from the movie in my head because there it was in the book. So... not exactly a 1:1, but pretty close. Until...
Once you get to a certain point in the novel, it diverges mostly in how much additional content is there. Like, Johnny Fontane is a major character, as is Lucy Mancini, and there's a whole storyline in Hollywood and Las Vegas that is interesting but was easily cut out to keep the movie focused on Don Vito and Michael's more compelling stories. The reason the Fontane stuff is there seems to be two-fold. (1) It's a reminder of the Don's far-seeing view and his ability to manage and manipulate things with a single move, and (2) pretty clearly Puzo was no fan of Hollywood and he wanted to do it dirt.
The novel is far more focused on how Don Vito operates as a puppet master (hence the marionette strings of the novel's cover) and sees him as a deity-like figure, able to manage his world with a few words or a gesture. The levers of power are out of view by design in the novel - he just casually mentions paying off judges, politicians, etc... but we barely get a view for how that works in practical terms. Some of that may sound like it's in the movie - but the book is far more direct about the scope and size of Vito Corleone's power.
There's significantly more sex in the book, which I understand was looked down on when the book came out, but it's not exactly shocking stuff. It's also naive to think that the way women are discussed is reflecting a thing that Puzo himself sees in the attitudes of the world he's describing, not one hebelieves himself.
Kay Adams is a more generic WASPy girl, and the changes made to Kay for the movie are interesting. The Kay of the book isn't Diane Keaton, and her fate is one of acceptance of her place in Michael's life at the end, not one of horror. I don't know that I prefer one over the other in context - but Kay's growth over the three films is kind of magnificent, so I am certain my bias is to the films, but the path in the novel also makes sense - especially with subtle clues given to how Mama Corleone actually feels about things and what role Kay will take on.
I'll be candid - part of why I wanted to return to this book was that I was looking at writing advice, and the modern take is to minimize the number of characters to less than ten named characters, and basically clean up the narrative until it's as straight a throughline as a Disney Animated movie. And that's probably right. But I also kept thinking "I think The Godfather has like sixty named characters". Google AI tells me it's 87. And a shocking number of those characters get paragraphs or chapters of back story. And, of course, we're told "you don't need to tell people that, that's for the writer to know". But... also... it's hard to imagine this same book without those rabbit holes.
I'm not saying modern writing advice is wrong, but I am saying - it's advice, not a set of immutable laws. And, lord knows, sometimes what people are looking for is something that feels like it didn't come off of an assembly line.
I'm not sure Puzo's prose is always as subtle as it could have been - the movie is understated and much is communicated in a look, a gesture, etc... the thing you can do in movies that a book requires a paragraph to explain. But I did sometimes wish that Puzo had said less once he'd established an idea - but the ideas he was conveying in 1969 likely required more prose to explain the concepts that are now ingrained in the cultural consciousness.
The novel is a bit of a Rorschach test. I did enjoy the commentary on the audiobook that followed, suggesting that The Godfather was the center of a pivot to Americans embracing crime stories over Westerns. And I believe that's probably true in part - but I do think that it minimizes the popularity of crime films from the dawn of film and the rich tapestry of gangster movies in the decades before this book. But it's such a big target, I can see how everyone could have a take.
What this book does is take Gangsterism from a city or neighborhood concern to a full economic and business system working as the secret infrastructure under America. And... the more you learn about America, the more you figure out anyone with power isn't following the rules normies live by. But as the commentator suggested, the book arrived in 1969, just as we were moving away from white hat heroes to a failure of belief in American institutions in the wake of Vietnam and headed toward Watergate - and while it's hardly a counter-culture artifact, it does presage the turn America would take in the sorts of moral complexity that would spill out of noir and into all genres as the Hayes Code fell apart.
For a long time I've said "The Wizard of Oz is the definitive American movie", and that came from a book for kids. I'm now more than willing to entertain the idea that The Godfather as both book and movie belong in that same privileged company - as media that have not just reached the zeitgeist but reshaped it and became part of the language of modern American.
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