Postscript: Joan Acocella 1945 - 2024

Joan Acocella (Photo by Bob Sacha)

New Yorker critic Joan Acocella died January 7, 2024, age 78. She was primarily a dance critic. But she also wrote many wonderful book reviews, several of which are included in her 2007 essay collection Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints. Acocella appreciated candor. She says of Susan Sontag, “She talked very straight” (“The Hunger Artist”). This applies to Acocella, too. Here, as a form of tribute, are some of my favorite lines from her work:

Butler’s chapter on Cather is not a chapter on Cather; it is an essay on politics in which Cather’s text lies bound and gagged. (“Cather and the Academy”)

Always plainspoken, she became more so. (“Feasting on Life”)

These are superb letters – long, meaty, intimate, conversational. You can practically hear her breathing. And they remind us of her faithfulness to reality, her ability to let things stay mixed and strange – to let them grow at the edges and stay loose in the center. (“Feasting on Life”)

We also needed more footnotes. But never mind. This is a priceless book: a whole life, a serious life, eighty-four years long. (“Feasting on Life”)

The grand cascading sentences ... (“Finding Augie March”)

One must love the book on artistic grounds – for its comedy, its generosity, its density, its linguistic miracles – and also, still, for its hopefulness. (“Finding Augie March”)

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. (“Piecework”)

Her sentences are frequently incomplete, her grammar nonstandard, her chapter titles a brazen lie. (“Piecework”)

In Bedford’s world, nobody is going to get ahead, or nobody nice, but meanwhile there is mercy, free hors d’oeuvres. (“Piecework”)

I don’t know of any novel about the early twentieth century that feels more real, as if you could reach out and touch the things in it. (“Piecework”)

She should stop apologizing. If Quicksands is a sort of rummage sale, what of it? (“Piecework”)

We all know these words, and use them to account for our lives. The cells are something else: hallucinations, the meat locker of the mind. (“The Spider’s Web”)

Down this road we can scarcely go in words. But we can accept an image, a metaphor. I have seen photographs of Russian children, in front of the Hermitage, staring up at Maman in wonder. They like it, presumably because it says something true. (“The Spider’s Web”)

Don’t laugh – Fitzgerald believes the same thing. She combines an old-world faith with a completely modern pessimism. (“Assassination on a Small Scale”)

And the writing was marvelous – high-toned, Brahmin, but full of zest and the pleasure of performing. Her openers were always thrown down with a great flourish. (“The Hunger Artist”)

Whatever she felt was fed back into her argument, a short, violent conflagration at the end of which any idea that illness is a mark of ennoblement or of shame—something that the victim caused or, by virtue of personality, was doomed to—lies like a burnt cinder at the bottom of Sontag’s rhetorical furnace. (“The Hunger Artist”)

But the montage is not surreal – it’s real, it’s New York City – and the objects don’t fly around in that self-important, dérèglement des sens way. They stay put, and honk the way they should. Waterfalls pour from the sky, but they’re really there, on a billboard. In the city O’Hara found his own, more modest version of Surrealist hallucination. (“Perfectly Frank”)

O’Hara loved things that lived in time, things that moved – ballet, movies, Action painting, New York – and he made himself the partner of time. [“Perfectly Frank”]

But the poems were manifesto enough. With their colloquialism, with their empirical record of daily events, with the friends wandering in and out – “Jap” (Jasper Johns) waiting at the train station, “Allen” (Ginsberg, hung over) throwing up in the bathroom – and, above all, with their craft so lightly worn, the poems constituted a clear refusal, if not of the high mission of poetry, then any duty to kneel before the throne. (“Perfectly Frank”)

In her novels, Mantel is unflinching, and I like her that way. (“Devil’s Work”)

I have stressed the dramatis diaboli, but in most of mantel’s novels there is a regular English reality going on that might make you wish for Hell instead. (“Devil’s Work”)

Ugly families, though, are only a subspecialty. Mantel is a master of ugliness in general. (“Devil’s Work”)

Art redeems us from time: in Hadrian’s case, by shaping his life into a meaningful curve (ambition to mastery to exaltation to disaster to reconciliation); in Yourcenar’s case, by enabling her to do the shaping, and in the process to write her first great novel, save her own life. (“Becoming the Emperor”)