The next don.(looking for an author to write 'The Godfather Returns')(Brief Article)

Like Mark Twain or Jimi Hendrix, Mario Puzo, who died in 1999, has been posthumously prolific. "Omerta," the last installment in his Mafia saga, was published a year after his death, and "The Family," a novel he'd started about mobsters, of a sort, in fifteenth-century Rome, was polished up by his companion, Carol Gino, and published last fall. But, because there is only so much writing a dead man can do, a call has gone out for a living writer capable of reviving the Puzo franchise.

Last Tuesday, Jonathan Karp, who was Puzo's editor at Random House, sent an e-mail to a handful of literary agents, soliciting an author for a new book about the Corleones, tentatively titled "The Godfather Returns." (Outlines are due November 4th; the winner will be picked by Random House and the Puzo estate.) The kind of writer Karp hopes to find, the e-mail explains, is "someone who is in roughly the same place in life Mario Puzo was when he wrote 'The Godfather'--at mid-career, with two acclaimed literary novels to his credit, who writes in a commanding and darkly comic omniscient voice." These specifications bring a few writers to mind--Jeffrey Eugenides, David Foster Wallace, Ethan Hawke--who could do a lot more with, say, Johnny Fontane. ("They'll have to make me an offer I can't refuse," Eugenides said.)

But it may be worth noting that where Puzo was when he wrote "The Godfather" was disillusioned and broke. His first two novels, "The Dark Arena" and "The Fortunate Pilgrim," had been well reviewed but were not widely read, so, at the age of forty-five, to turn a buck, he decided to crank out his Mob story. There are many ways to look at a life, but one way to look at Puzo's is that he sold out and then spent the rest of his days half regretting it. However rich he got, he was never again taken seriously as a writer writer, which is what he had initially set out to be. "I wished like hell I'd written it better," he said of "The Godfather." "I wrote below my gifts in that book."

The author of "The Godfather Returns," then, will have the benefit of hindsight. Facing the indignity of such pulp production, he may elect to compensate for it by writing a good ...