PRIZZI'S FAMILY

by Richard Condon ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 23, 1986

Prizi's Honor was much better as a film than as a novel: Jack Nicholson's charming performance as Brooklyn's Charley Partanna (charmless on the page) helped to make that creepy hit-persons' romance oddly involving; John Huston's direction, while preserving Condon's healthy cynicism about the bestial nonsense of Mafia ""honor,"" softened the black comedy with the sheer pleasures of lush, crafty movie-making. And now this ""prequel""--all about Charley back in 1969, at age 30, again caught in a strange love-triangle with Maerose Prizzi--will benefit from the celluloid version, as readers imagine Nicholson and Oscar-winner Anjelica Huston in the central roles. Through the thin, episodic narrative here, top hit-man Charley takes on assignments for the Prizzi super-mob--silencing a hoodlum who's about to turn stool-pigeon, unleashing cyanide grenades on some drug-trade rivals, brutally taking vengeance on Mob traitors, sabotaging the mayoral campaign of a religious-reformer candidate (by framing the candidate's prissy son on sex/drug charges). There are digressions--a few vignettes, mostly just descriptive little essays--that present Condon's gleefully sardonic view of an America entirely dominated by the Mafia: Maerose's Uncle Eduardo, for instance, under the name Edward S. Price, is a mega-tycoon, ""the great, gray eminence of American politics. . .the man with the clout far beyond clout; the briber of governments."" But the novel's primary interest again stems from Charley's infatuation with a blonde bombshell: this time it's gorgeous British showgirl Mardell La Tour, a quirky giantess who seems to reciprocate Charley's crazed passion. What Charley doesn't know, however, is that Mardell is really a daffy American heiress who's just pretending to be a showgirl--for ludicrous, implausible reasons. Worse yet, the hot, misguided romance becomes a nasty triangle when young Maerose Prizzi, hoping to some day take over the Prizzi empire, decides that she needs Charley as her partner/husband: she seduces him (""It was like being locked in a mail bag with eleven boa constrictors""), traps him into an engagement, forces him to give up Mardell (who couldn't care less, as it happens), and almost marries him. . .before disgracing herself (and letting Charley off the hook) at a lavish Prizzi gathering. As usual, some of Condon's satire--the cartoon-portrait of the Falwell-like politician, for example--is gross rather than pointed. The Mardell La Tour character is a half-developed farcical notion, never quite rising from silly to loonily inspired. And, thanks in part to sloppy anachronisms aplenty (references to Star Wars, Arnold Schwarzenegger, etc.), there's no conviction in the 1969 setting. But the sketches of Mafia viciousness and hypocrisy are often deliciously mordant; and, with those movie characterizations to bolster Charley and Maerose in the reader's mind, there's enough dark whimsy and oafish pathos here to provide earthy, quirky, fast-moving entertainment.

Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Putnam

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1986

Categories: FICTION