That Mario Puzo was able to get the shaggy, didactic mess that is Fools Die published -- and have it garner so many rave reviews -- is a tribute to his (inexplicable to me) reputation as "America's master storyteller", to quote the publisher's tag on the back cover, and a function of the nearly forgotten time in which it was published: that a popular novelist, as opposed to a "literary" novelist, could publish such a shapeless hodgepodge of musings on American pop culture as epitomized by Las Vegas (gambling), New York (publishing) and Hollywood (movies), garner enough big-ups from various book-chatters for five pages of rave blurbs for the first paperback edition, and apparently also actually sell mass quantities without resorting to tying it to one or more schools of literary theory and so endear it to the humanities markets of Academe, is nothing short of incredible in the year of 2008.

Fools Die is mainly the story of John Merlyn (whom nearly everybody calls by his last name), a peripatetic gambler who yearns to become a published author, eventually does, and then gets punked by Hollywood when his best-selling first novel is turned into a mainstream movie. Secondary plots concern a gambling buddy named Cully who manages to turn his avocation into a career when he's taken under the wing of the mobbed-up owner of the hotel-casino Xanadu, Gronevelt, and the Nobel Prize-contender Osano, who more or less takes Merlyn under his wing. (It's difficult to see Osano as anything other than a dumbed-down stand-in for Norman Mailer, even though Mailer is name-checked in passing.) Merlyn and his brother Artie grew up in an orphanage; Merlyn chose his last name due to an adolescent love of Arthurian stories (with particular emphasis on T.H. White's The Once and Future King tetralogy, since Merlyn makes repeated references to Merlin's living backwards through time), and while mention is made of Merlin's disastrous love-life, Merlyn's luck with the ladies isn't nearly as bad as his namesake's. The point of view continually shifts between first person (largely Merlyn's, with a brief, unfortunate exception for Merlyn's inamorata; this chapter should serve as sufficient proof of Puzo's inability to write women) and third person omniscient (largely Cully, with a couple of notable exceptions), to no real benefit to the (extremely loose) narrative.

While Fools Die has several interesting, even amusing, anecdotes, it never rises above the episodic; while technically it could be classified as a picaresque, it's far too desultory, and far too self-conscious, to wear that label comfortably. Various characters over-use the word "cunt" to a surprising degree, but the inherent sexism (despite Merlyn's protestations that Osano is really a man who loves women; the fact that Henry Miller is never name-dropped is perhaps significant, given the manner in which Osano loves and expresses his love for women) doesn't end there: Merlyn goes so far as to complain, in the course of relating a bit of by-play between himself and his mistress, the actress Janelle, "I hate women using words like 'fuck' and 'cunt' and 'mother-fucker'" (p. 312). Of course: Allah forefend that a mere woman exhibit the verbal mastery of the male.

Puzo falls down most obviously in his depictions of the literary world and of America's leading literary lion, Osano. It's probably not a good idea, unless you're writing a satire on literary taste, to hold a character up as a perpetual finalist for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and then offer examples of said character's prose. The fragment of Osano's unfinished novel (and this is another example of the problems with the timeline of Fools Die: the dates grow increasingly fuzzy the farther from the early 1950s that the novel progresses; while the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK are never mentioned, we somehow are expected to accept the advent of the free-love hippie movement of the late 1960s and the onset of the women's liberation movement of the early 1970s, while at the same time believe that a noted spendthrift like Osano could live large for ten years off of a $100,000 publisher's advance for a novel that he never delivers; there is no way that Osano could enjoy his standard of living over such a period with such a bankroll, even in the late '60s and early '70s), which Merlyn finds so bedazzling, is nothing short of risible, but I would be very surprised to learn that Puzo himself thought it so. There are other bits that ring tinny and false, such as when Merlyn recounts Osano's indignation at being jacked around by Hollywood:

"Didn't they know that he was world-famous, the darling of literary critics from London to New Delhi, from Moscow to Sydney, Australia? He was famous in thirty languages, including the different variations of the Slavic." (p. 248)

One can only marvel that the Indian literary establishment of the late 1960s/early 1970s (I offer this tentative timeline based on a character referencing, on the next page, "'the director who's going to make that western with Clint Eastwood'"; since Eastwood was unknown prior to the "Man With No Name" trilogy of spaghetti westerns directed by Sergio Leone, this scene can't take place any earlier than 1966, and probably occurs in 1968 or 1969) would enjoy, if not enshrine, the work of someone like Osano, or that Osano should be published in the Soviet Union around the time of its summary termination of the "Prague Spring" (no mention is made of samizdat, or underground, literature, which would've been the only way that someone like Osano could've been published in the Brezhnev-era U.S.S.R.). The absurd didacticism of "the different variations of the Slavic" is also characteristic of the literary world passages in Fools Die: one might as well say that Osano was translated into "the different variations of the Romantic", or even "the different variations of the Indo-European". "W", as Internet parlance has it, "TF"?

In short, Fools Die is never quite boring enough to cast aside, yet never quite compelling enough to devour at speed if more promising material is at hand: it is, in short, the epitome of the "airport book" -- something to be read only if nothing better can be found. ( )

I read 339 pages. NO MORE! Its ideas on sex are trite, mass-produced ideas. The book as a whole is very trite. ( )