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The Godfather Returns (2004)

At a glance

Author
Mark Winegardner
Published
November 16, 2004
Publisher
Random House
Story years
1955–1962
Series position
Third; chronologically between the novel and Part II
Authorized by
The Puzo estate

Five years after Puzo's death, Random House decided the property should continue and ran a competition to find the author. Several thousand people submitted synopses and sample chapters. The winner was Mark Winegardner, a novelist and director of the creative writing program at Florida State University, who had never written crime fiction.

The result is a good deal better than a franchise continuation has any right to be, and it still can't quite solve the problem it was given.

What it covers

The book opens where Puzo's novel ended — 1955, Michael newly installed as Don — and runs to 1962. It threads through the events of Part II rather than around them, treating the film's plot as background and filling the spaces between.

Its main additions:

Nick Geraci. A Corleone capo, boxer, and pilot, invented wholesale by Winegardner and the spine of both his novels. Geraci is smart, patient, and ultimately the most dangerous enemy Michael ever makes — and the fact that he does not exist in the films is the central continuity problem of the continuation novels. The years Winegardner gives him are years Part II accounts for differently.

Michael's war. An extended treatment of Michael's Marine service in the Pacific, which the films reference and never depict.

Fredo, expanded. Winegardner gives Fredo an interior life, a secret, and considerably more agency than the films allow him. Some readers find this the book's best work; others find it a violation of a character whose entire tragedy is that he has no interior life anyone bothered to look at.

The next generation. Francesca Corleone, Sonny's daughter, becomes a major viewpoint character — one of the few genuinely new things in any continuation novel, and the strongest argument for the book's existence.

Danny Shea and the beginnings of the Kennedy-analogue material that dominates the sequel.

Reception

Mixed, and mixed in an interesting way: reviewers generally granted that Winegardner could write, and doubted the project.

Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times called it a solid enough performance — dutiful, suspenseful, and only occasionally annoying — which is about as good as a franchise novel gets from that particular critic.

The recurring complaint is structural rather than literary. Puzo's novel worked because it was one story told from the inside. The Godfather Returns is an act of interpolation: it has to fit between things that already exist, cannot contradict them, and therefore cannot ever be the story that matters. Every important event in Michael Corleone's life between 1955 and 1962 is already on film.

Sales were substantial. A sequel followed two years later.

Canon status

Estate-authorized; not reflected in any film. Winegardner's inventions — Geraci above all — occupy narrative space the films fill differently.

Read it as a well-made parallel account, not as a missing chapter. See Continuity § Tier 4.

See also