The New Yorker:

The critic, an enemy of pretension, addressed a dazzling array of subjects with intelligence and a one-of-a-kind wit.

By Alexandra Schwartz

new piece by Joan Acocella was reason enough to cancel plans. What had she chosen to tackle this time? Balanchine? The Book of Job? Harry Potter? Arsenic? There seemed to be no subject that she couldn’t take on. A little over a year ago, I hoped to review a book on Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. No dice; Joan had claimed it. Annoyance at not being able to write turned instantly to gladness at being able to read. Now I am doubly glad. Joan died last weekend, at seventy-eight, from cancer; that essay was the last she published in this magazine. She herself might not have been so deferential. “Remember: if I do not get to review it, I will throw myself out the window with a note pinned to my chest saying that this was all your fault,” she once wrote to an editor, of a history of tap dance. “Happy new year! May you be rich and happy!”

That humor was pure Joan. No writer was funnier, or more original. “Clang! Clang!” her essay on Martin Luther begins; that is the sound of the hammer nailing the Ninety-five Theses to the church. Her own sound was singular, in life as in print. If you called her, as I often did while working with her as a fact checker, a decade ago, and then as an editor’s assistant, you got used to waiting out a dozen rings and the answering-machine greeting—she screened the old-fashioned way—followed by the sudden burst of that rich, deliberate voice picking the conversation up midstream. (She might hang up just as suddenly to rush out to the movies with her partner, Noël Carroll, whom she liked to call “my boyfriend.”) Sarah Larson, who did transcription work for her back in the day, remembers Joan swanning out from her bedroom mid-afternoon-nap in nightgown and eye mask to intercept a message from Mikhail Baryshnikov. “In him there is simply more to see than in most other dancers,” she wrote in a Profile, to the point as ever.

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