The Sicilian, by Mario Puzo (Simon & Schuster, 410 pp., $17.95)
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.
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