Who Remembers Noah Romano?

Who reads Noah Romano now? Twenty years after his death, the author of The Bronx and A Funny Thing Happened On the Plane has slipped from our cultural memory. Updike is remembered for his prose. Mailer is remembered for his antics. Roth is remembered for his prose and his antics. But Romano? One suspects most educated millennials haven’t even heard of him.

Born in, well, the Bronx, to an Italian father and a Jewish mother, the young novelist faced the material and psychological stress of immigrant life. His first love was not books at all — in fact, it was the cinema. The young Romano loved to watch Westerns, film noir and, especially, the first nascent sci fi films. He turned to writing, he said, because he had no way of making films.

The Bronx was written in less than a month — portraying an alien invasion of New York. How it came to be published is somewhat mysterious — more on that later — but when it came out in 1962 it was hailed as a deeply satirical reflection on the vexed interlocked state of high culture and popular culture, as well as on its earthy proletarian roots. “An imaginative triumph,” said the Partisan Review. “Surreal and incisive,” wrote one critic in Dissent.

Romano was catapulted into the higher realms of American letters, along with young guns like Roth and Updike as well as established names like Bellow and Vidal. He was soon hotly pursued for essays in the leading journals of the period, where his film criticism was embraced for its satirical “neo-populist” style.

With success came wealth and fame. A string of literary girlfriends passed through his life, at a time when having a young novelist by one’s side counted for more than having an actor or a musician. He was a particular favourite of gossip columnists, being, as one critic later reflected, “as prolific a lover as Roth and as prolific a pugilist as Mailer.” A disastrous marriage to the young essayist Zuzia Gaston ended in four days — allegedly when the pair sobered up from an extended bender and decided that they didn’t like each other after all.

Such chaotic events were a regrettable distraction from Romano’s literary career — though his later essay “On My Marriage”, published in The Village Voice in 1971, was welcomed and critiqued in equal terms as an extension of Updike on the sexual revolution and Mailer on women’s lib.

The next novel, though, did not arrive until 1972. A Funny Thing Happened on the Plane follows a man who almost ejaculates as his passenger jet is taking off and is transported into a world of “peak experiences” (Romano had been influenced by the English author Colin Wilson, who had written The Outsider). Its modernist structure and psychedelic style led it to be praised as “60s culture growing up in a new decade”. Some drew comparisons with Thomas Pynchon, whose Gravity’s Rainbow would be published the following year.

But Romano’s artistic and personal life took a strange turn in the mid-70s when the novelist and commentator Gore Vidal claimed that he had had The Bronx published as a practical joke on the New York intellectual scene. Vidal claimed to have acquired a manuscript through friends, to whom Romano had earnestly sent draft copies, and to have sought its publication in an attempt to prove that “anything presented seriously will be taken seriously”.

Critics circled the wagons around The Bronx, hailing its satirical and experimental qualities. “It was among the first postmodern novels,” wrote one critic in the New York Review of Books, “In effect if not in intent.”

Perhaps growing defensive, however, critics belatedly turned on Romano’s second novel. A new edition of A Funny Thing Happened On the Plane was described as “puerile” in National Review, “indulgent” in Dissent, “trivial” in Commentary and “a mess” in the New York Times. Plans for a film adaptation were quietly shelved.

Romano took this hard. Meeting the vicious Commentary reviewer Jacob Ellstein at a party, Romano punched him on the chin. From the floor, a dazed Ellstein quipped, “It feels humiliating to be touched by the hand which typed A Funny Thing Happened on the Plane.” Romano promptly kicked him.

Critical neglect was not helped by his politics. In the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, Jewish-American writers were evaluating their relationship with Israel. Asked to write about his own perspective, Romano huffed that he felt more Sicilian than anything and would like to talk about the growth of Cosa Nostra. His book on the Second Mafia War, Postcards From Palermo, was widely ignored.

Romano moved to rural Montana, where he continued to write. Yellowstone was about a New York novelist moving to rural Montana, and Milktopia was about a cat who takes over the world. He never again reached the critical or popular heights he had once scaled, though he had a cult following of “Romanoacs” who read his every word. The alternative filmmaker Vince Lago featured him in an independent horror film about a book that eats people.

9/11 brought about a brief revival of interest in A Funny Thing Happened On the Plane, with some critics arguing that the novel had foreseen the union of modern travel and primal violence. At this point, Romano was himself more interested in birdwatching than literature. He died falling off a cliff aged 70.

It might be tempting to forget Noah Romano, who rose like a star and then fell — in more ways that one — at just as great a speed. But his life and work present a unique snapshot of 20th Century letters, and the best of prose has an indefinable power that one might — just might — call the product of genius.