Mario Puzo is primarily a novelist, a storyteller of uncommon gifts whose American literary ancestors are the Naturalistic writers who focus on the American "cityscape," on the lower orders of the middle class, the streets, the resourcefulness, the upward or downward mobility of emigrants or persons but one generation removed from Europe. Puzo explores the underbelly of social institutions and has a sure sense of urban social process; his vision, however, is more persuasive when he handles smaller, interlocking segments of society: a family group, a mother's role in a Lower East Side tenement neighborhood, the tensions engendered by ethnic, religious, and economic considerations. Thus his vision of society is highly personal and he seldom addresses a single, major, conceptual issue in the sustained way, for example, that Dreiser explores the nature of distributive justice in An American Tragedy (1925). In addressing the theme of either petty or organized...