SOURCE: A review of The Sicilian, in The National Review, April 5, 1985, pp. 52-4.

In the following review, Royal notes that in The Sicilian, "Puzo has returned to some of his richer human material that won him critical acclaim for his early novels."

Generally speaking, the modern novel is not so much an art form as a predicament. When belief in man as the rational animal wavers, as it often does in modern fiction, one or the other of two extremes predominates: angelism (the self-regarding, purely intellectual world of ideologies, doctrinaire feminism, labyrinths, hypertrophied sensitivities, stories within stories within stories) or bestialism (radically purposeless lust and violence). The result is a loss of true imaginative power in spite of the emotional, intellectual, and literary force of a given work. We get many fictions that are, in a word, effete.

You could not apply that term to Mario Puzo's The...