Heel over Head

By Michael Demarest

PRIZZI'S HONOR

by Richard Condon

Coward, McCann & Geoghegan

316 pages; $13.95

"Pop had a seven-tiered Sicilian brain so that when they said A to him, he knew right away that he should read it as Z but would always stand ready to switch it to the real meaning, inside the real meaning of the false meaning, which he would read as M." Pop is Angelo Partanna, consigliere to the nation's most puissant Mafia family. His son Charley is underboss and chief enforcer for the family, a geratic Brooklyn Mob headed by Corrado Prizzi, 84. Charley, the anti-hero of Prizzi's Honor, is somewhat deficient in the paternal paranoia that has helped earn the gang international clout and an annual gross income of $1.7 billion. However, he took out his first Prizzi foe when he was only 13, and has been earning great respect ever since. He is unswervingly loyal, has a voice like "a talking brewery horse" and boasts "the best bowels of anyone in the Prizzi family." He can also shoot straight.

Charley is No. 5 in the hierarchy, and there is seemingly nothing to block his ascent--until he falls heel over head in love with a semigorgeous broad named Irene Walker. To the hulking bachelor hoodlum, she is "a classic, like the Truman win over Dewey." Irene is not Sicilian, but a Pole from Los Angeles who is semimarried to a Jew; she is also a freelance assassin who has shot one man for the Prizzis and, on the side, scammed them for $360 ($360? The other 000 is always omitted in family conversation, supposedly "to confuse the tourists"). Novelist Richard Condon's Prizzi family is not boroughs but planets distant from Mario Puzo's Corleones. These soldiers have no dignity and not a shred of redeeming decency. Don Corrado, with his "small, sharp eyes, as merry as ice cubes," is driven like all his men by pure avarice and a brutish lust for power. Prizzi and his top aides--loosely modeled on the late Carlo Gambino and his Mob--have never even "been beyond Brooklyn or Vegas"; they do not read newspapers or go to college. Yet, as Charley proudly observes, the Prizzi family "runs this country just the same as the Senate does or General Motors or Alexander Haig, junior." The Mob is funnier. When the Prizzis give a testimonial banquet for one of their number, they hire the world's greatest tenor to sing one song: the number is an aria from Verdi's Les Vepres Siciliennes recounting the slaughter of the defenseless French by Sicilian patriots. The overcrowded hall is set afire by a rival gang, and 89 guests are parboiled. "Miraculously, the Congressmen and the judges came through the fire unharmed."

Condon's stylish prose and rich comedic gift once again spice a moral sensibility that has animated 16 novels since The Manchurian Candidate appeared in 1962. If wit and irony could somehow neutralize villainy, the novelist would make a fine FBI director. Prizzi's Honor, like most of his books, comes sometimes too close to the truth for comfort, and it has what many may regard as a shocking end. On the other hand, the crime family survives, its billions and precious omerta intact. And that, Richard Condon points out, makes it "the all-American success story." --By Michael Demarest

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.