In an article, “Why New York’s Mob Mythology Endures,” Adam Gopnik writes:
[The Mafia] has supplied our only reliable, weatherproof American mythology, one sturdy enough to sustain and resist debunking or revisionism. Cowboys turn out to be racist and settlers genocidal, and even astronauts have flaws. But mobsters come pre-disgraced, as jeans come pre-distressed; what bad thing can you say about the Mob that hasn’t been said already? So residual virtues, if any, shine bright. . . .
Good point. He continues:
You could still imagine that books debunking the Cosa Nostra, revealing a truth less glamorous if not more virtuous than what has been peddled, would be plentiful. But, where you could not get a popular historian to repeat the story of, say, Clara Barton and the American Red Cross without much close squinting and revision, a book about the Mob in New York will happily repeat the same twenty stories already known, without probing the possibility that, given the Mob’s secrecy and need for self-generated storytelling, much of what we think we know may not be remotely true. When revision does occur, it meets a stony response. . . .
In his review, Gopnik mentions several books and movies, but not The Sopranos (which, I agree, does its demythologizing in a way that leaves the latter-day mobsters as yet another collection of adorable killers) and, most notably for me, not Honor Thy Father, a book that I read several years ago after Palko recommended it in our comments section.
Honor Thy Father, written by the legendary Mad Men-era magazine writer Gay Talese, is an odd book. In its tone it follows (or, perhaps I should say, is one of the originators of) the classic writing-about-the-Mafia style, with a mix of solemnity, action, and musings on familial bonds. And I got the sense from reading the book that Talese had a lot of affection for his subjects. On the other hand, if you look at the actual content, it’s the story of a spoiled young man who’s never worked a day in his life and whose only core conviction seems to be that he should never have to pay for anything with his own money. The book starts off with some going-to-the-mattresses drama and I thought it was heading for Godfather-style shootouts, but it devolves into a cross-country trip of motel rooms and stolen credit cards, a sort of Lolita without the plot. Wikipedia quotes a New York Times review stating that Talese “conveys the impression that being a mobster is much the same as being a sportsman, film star or any other kind of public ‘personality,'” but I think that misses the point. Sportsmen, film stars, etc. are paid to do their jobs and entertain people. Bill Bonanno was just a well-connected thief. Even “thief” sounds too glamorous, like he’s some kind of Lupin. But, yes, Bonanno gives off some of the vibes of a Joseph Heller middle-manager character.
To say this is not to diss Talese. On the contrary, I find it admirable that he could tell it like it was (or at least appear to do so; it’s not like I have any idea how it really was, or is) and not feel the need to warp the content to match the style.
Anyway, I’m surprised that in his essay Gopnik never mentioned Honor Thy Father. It’s one of the top mob books of all time, no? And I think its mix of elegiac style and debunking content fits Gopnik’s story.
After the incident with The Voyeur’s Motel, I wonder how much I trust anything Talese ever wrote, honestly.
Anon:
Yeah, good point. I wonder if anyone’s looked into the general question of how much Talese was making things up in all those articles he wrote over the years. I also don’t have a great sense as to why he was considered such a legend among literary journalists during all that time.
Talese arguably benefitted from timing and company. He was at the center of the emergence of New Journalism. “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” is still considered one of the seminal pieces in the genre. He also suffers from the flipside. His innovations have been so imitated that the original seems a bit stale just as the Dick Van Dyke Show can seem a little cliched because so many of its ideas have been lifted. Wolfe and Capote seem fresher in part because they were harder to steal from.
Of course, pretty much all of the New Journalists have faced charges of embellishment (though I believe Wolfe was given a clean bill of health), but I think The Voyeur’s Motel may have been a special case, in part because Talese was getting tired and in part because of the general creepiness of the whole thing.
Yeah, it’s true, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” is, by itself, a massively important contribution, even if it had been the only thing he’d ever done, and I’ve never heard any suggestion he made any of that up.
> I also don’t have a great sense as to why he was considered such a legend
> written by the legendary Mad Men-era magazine writer Gay Talese
Ooof, I feel misled.
It’s set in a different location, but Diego Gambetta’s The Sicilian Mafia is not just a favorite mob book but a favorite book, period. I have no way of knowing whether his analysis actually works, but it sounds plausible and it’s a great read.
I don’t recall The Valachi Papers as being particularly romanticized.
Romanticized or not romanticized, the workaday shmuck adores the mobster; as the model of agency; of will; of untrammeled animal spirits; who takes no guff from the working shmucks who scamper around their whole lives hiding an acorn here a peanut there. The mobster is the hawk; the terror of the squirrel-shmucks and the god they worship. “Live by the sword; die by the sword” Ah! if only he could reach such heights of austere and terrible justice … if only he could supervene the petty sticky ties of ‘yessir’ and ‘yesmum’ that bind him and his fellows to one another, their scampering around in their petty, dirty little burrows, secreting an acorn here,a peanut there …
“Gopnik mentions several books and movies, but not The Sopranos”
He also left out Donnie Brasco and the Friends of Eddie Coyle and a number of other examples that would have completely undercut his closing paragraph.