Top Ten New Yorker Book Reviews, 1976 - 2011, #7: Joan Acocella's "Piecework"

I like Joan Acocella’s work when it stays close to the writing under review, analyzing the “how” of it. For example, in “Heaven’s Gate” (The New Yorker, September 11, 2006), she says,

A book [Alice McDermott’s After This] so drenched in compassion: how does McDermott keep it this side of sentimentality? Sometimes she doesn’t – one or two scenes hurt your teeth – but mostly she does, in several ways.

And then, in the best paragraphs of the piece, Acocella shows us the “several ways” (e.g., “In After This, she’s back to realism, but her language has changed – it tumbles out, freer, more elliptical”).

In “Finding Augie March” (The New Yorker, October 6, 2003; included in her excellent 2007 collection Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints), a review of the Library of America’s Novels 1944-1953, by Saul Bellow, she follows a quotation from The Adventures of Augie March with this inspired simile:

Such sentences occur on almost every page. They are like hall closets; you open them and everything falls out.

I’m awed by Acocella’s writing purely as writing – the way it blends description and analysis. Here are a couple of examples:

Despite O’Hara’s antimetaphysical bent, many of his poems have a kind of dome of glory that rises up over the minutiae of his days. (“Perfectly Frank,” The New Yorker, July 19, 1993; collected in Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints)

I think she [Paula Fox] needed to be, and that these repellent creatures – the warty snake, the tapeworm coiling to the very rim of the toilet bowl – may be images of how, after becoming the little gray ghost that she learned to be as a child, she finally extruded that, with horror, and moved forward, empty at first, into art. (“From Bad Beginnings,” The New Yorker, May 16, 2011)

My favorite Acocella passage – an analysis of Sybille Bedford’s writing style – occurs in her terrific “Piecework” (The New Yorker, April 18, 2005; included in Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints), a review of Bedford’s memoir Quicksands. Acocella, in the piece’s most interesting passage, looks at Bedford’s 1953 travel classic A Visit to Don Otavio. She says:

All of this is told with a tart, fresh empiricism. Here are the book’s opening sentences:

    The upper part of Grand Central Station is large and splendid like the Baths of Caracalla.
    “Your rooms are on Isabel la Católica,” said Guillermo.
     “How kind of you,” said I.
     “Pensión Hernández.”
     “What is it like?”
     “The manager is very unkind. He would not let me have my clothes when I was arrested. But you will have no trouble.”

We never find out why Guillermo got arrested, or even who he is, but this little exchange is a perfect introduction to Bedford’s style: speed, omission, the sharp bite of event, without the tedious explanation.

It’s a sublime quote, followed by a line of brilliant descriptive analysis. I remember reading it and thinking, Yes! That’s the way to do it, with “speed, omission, the sharp bite of event, without the tedious explanation.” On the basis of Acocella’s wonderful review, I went out and bought a copy of A Visit to Don Otavio. It is a terrific book. I count it among my favorites.

Today, in at least partial payment of my debt to Acocella for bringing Don Otavio to my attention, I'm pleased to name her marvelous “Piecework” to my “Top Ten.”

Credit: The above artwork is by Fido Nesti; it appears in The New Yorker, January 7, 2008, as an “On The Horizon” illustration for the event “Eat, Drink & Be Literary,” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.