"Never mind that they ought to know better by now. They're reviewing the money again and not the book. This time it's...a knowing, muscular, many charactered, and—what's worse—absolutely readable New York folk-tale about the Mafia. Granted, The Godfather does ask for it in a way, with almost $500,000 in advance from hardcover, paperback and movie rights; consider what book reviews usually pay and you'll see why a book like this so easily brings out the worst sort of moral indignation in so many critics... He's got to be just another literary crapshooter who's made the Big Killing overnight. The trouble with all that, of course, is that "overnight" happened to be 20 years. During that time, Puzo wrote three books in which he painstakingly and shrewdly set his wit to mastering about as much as a man needs to know about the craft of writing fiction. With his second novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim, he had, in fact, nailed down a solid name for himself as a good but little known (and therefore uncorrupted, right?) chronicler of Italian-American life. Now Puzo is making money from his writing. So naturally he's only writing in order to make money. You don't have to be a Sicilian to enjoy a vendetta."