Joan Acocella, erudite cultural critic for the New Yorker, dies at 78

Joan Acocella, a cultural critic whose essays for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books — by turns stylish, erudite, droll and self-effacing — established her as an indispensable guide to modern dance and literature, died Jan. 7 at her home in Manhattan. She was 78.

The cause was cancer, said her son, Bart Acocella.

Raised in a prim upper-middle-class home in the Bay Area, Ms. Acocella initially planned to become an academic and spent more than a decade working toward a PhD in comparative literature. But soon after moving to Manhattan with her husband, in 1968, she fell under the spell of choreographer George Balanchine, discovering that she could attend New York City Ballet performances free if she joined the ballet guild and worked in the gift shop during intermission.

“Sometimes you hear people say that Balanchine changed their lives, and it sounds like hyperbole, but such a thing can happen,” she told Ballet Review magazine in 2016. “Balanchine did change my life. Within a few years my husband and I had separated, and I had become a dance critic.”

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At publications including the New Yorker, where she served as dance critic from 1998 to 2019, and the New York Review of Books, where she freelanced for more than four decades, Ms. Acocella wrote about dancers and choreographers including Bob Fosse, Suzanne Farrell, Vaslav Nijinsky and Mikhail Baryshnikov, who endured years of surveillance and repression in the Soviet Union before defecting to the West in 1974.

“Homelessness turned him inward, gave him to himself,” she wrote of Baryshnikov’s self-imposed exile. “Then dance, the substitute home, turned him outward, gave him to us.”

Ms. Acocella (pronounced ack-ah-CHELL-uh) turned outward in her own way, moving from dance to other forms of art and culture, both high and low. She wrote about writer’s block and profanity; the comedy of Richard Pryor and the nuance that James Gandolfini brought to gangster character Tony Soprano; the influence of “Little Women” and the enduring appeal of vampires. The latter characters are often treated as “a persecuted minority,” she observed in 2009: “Sometimes they are like black people (lynch mobs pursue them), sometimes like homosexuals (rednecks beat them up). Meanwhile, they are trying to go mainstream.”

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Covering dance helped her write about literature, she told the New York Review last year, teaching her “to stay close to style and tone, and not always to be so intent on the story.” At the same time, “literature taught me to be concerned about the moral life, in dance, too — how people behave toward one another, and what they take from and give to one another.”

Writing about “Gilgamesh,” the world’s oldest long poem, Ms. Acocella suggested that the book was not “a finished, polished composition … but, rather, something more like life, untidy, ambiguous.” Profiling Susan Sontag in the New Yorker, she likened the critic first to philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and then to silent-film star Buster Keaton: “There they both go, eyes straight ahead, utterly intent on what they’re trying to do — get the girl, understand Communism — and oblivious of the felled houses, the outraged constables that they leave in their wake.”

Ms. Acocella dissected the work of actress Frances McDormand, sculptor Louise Bourgeois and puppeteer Basil Twist, as well as authors including Agatha Christie, Primo Levi and Hilary Mantel (“She always goes for color, richness, music”). Whatever medium she was exploring, she often noted the hardships that artists faced while doing their work and studied how some artists falter while others find lasting fame.

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“What allows genius to flower is not neurosis, but its opposite,” she wrote in the introduction to her essay collection “Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints” (2007), praising “ordinary, Sunday-school virtues such as tenacity and above all the ability to survive disappointment.”

David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, described Ms. Acocella in a phone interview as among the most passionate of American critics. “You’d give her a subject, and then she’d go read 30 books on it and go see every movie that had anything to do with it.” He added, “Every great writer has a voice as distinctive as their fingerprints, and Joan’s voice was just wildly alive with erudition and humor and generosity.”

Susan Sontag is dead at 71; cultural author, activist was a fearless thinker

Reflecting on Sontag’s landmark essay collection “Against Interpretation,” Ms. Acocella wrote that the author performed “what should be an essential function of criticism, that of introducing readers to new work, weird work, things they wouldn’t ordinarily encounter.” What’s more, she added, Sontag “did so in a notably un-weird manner,” exploring the 1960s counterculture without alienating mainstream readers.

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Ms. Acocella could have been describing herself, author Kathryn Harrison noted in a review for the New York Times.

“Like Sontag, like every great critic, Acocella is subjective, uncompromising,” Harrison wrote. “She has a distinct point of view, a refreshingly not-fashionable one … and writes from her conviction that beneath its hectic, irresponsible, even intoxicated surface, art makes singularly unglamorous demands: integrity, sacrifice, discipline. Hers is a vision that allows art its mystery but not its pretensions, to which she is acutely sensitive. What better instincts could a critic have?”

Drawn to ‘the wrong kind of people’

The second of three children, Joan Barbara Ross was born in San Francisco on April 13, 1945, and grew up in nearby Oakland. Her father was a cement company executive, her mother a homemaker who signed her up for dance lessons and occasionally took her to the San Francisco Ballet.

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After graduating from the Anna Head School for Girls in Berkeley, Ms. Acocella studied English at the city’s University of California campus. She spent her junior year abroad in Italy, where she said she happily abandoned the cloistered world of her childhood after meeting “the wrong kind of people” — intellectuals, or as she put it, “people without tans, people who went to flute concerts.”

Weeks after she graduated in 1966, she married Nick Acocella, a graduate student who later became an author and political journalist. They moved east, where Ms. Acocella said she initially tried “to become a good wife,” reading cookbooks and focusing on raising their son, before getting an editing job at Prentice Hall and then at Random House.

For years, she paid the bills with money from a popular psychology textbook that she was assigned to co-write, and then rewrite for multiple editions, with experts in the field. “I revised that book until David Remnick, at the New Yorker, kindly paid me to stop,” she said.

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Ms. Acocella received her doctorate in comparative literature in 1984 from Rutgers University. By then she had started her career as a dance critic — she was able to persuade the school to let her write her dissertation about the influence of the Ballets Russes — and was working as a reviews editor at Dance Magazine. She was later the book reviews editor for Dance Research Journal, the lead dance critic for the magazine Seven Days and a dance critic for the New York Daily News, Financial Times and Wall Street Journal.

In 1993, she published her first book as an author, “Mark Morris,” a study of the idiosyncratic, shaggy-haired dancer and choreographer. “He was my idea of the perfect young artist,” she said, “in the sense that he was crazy.” (“My philosophy of dance?” she quoted him as saying. “I make it up, and you watch it. End of philosophy.”)

Ms. Acocella’s later books included “Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder” (1999), which accused mental health professionals of betraying their patients with sensationalist claims of hidden memories and multiple personalities, and “Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism” (2000), an expansion of a New Yorker essay. Her latest collection, “The Bloodied Nightgown,” will be published next month.

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Her marriage ended in divorce. In addition to her son, survivors include her partner, philosopher Noël Carroll; a sister; a brother; and two grandchildren.

Ms. Acocella published her final New York Review articles last spring, returning to the figure who had inspired her to become a dance critic. Reviewing Jennifer Homans’s monumental new biography of Balanchine, she likened the choreographer to Mozart, writing that he “often gladdens your heart in order, then, to break it, whereupon, in the next movement, he tells us that we have to go on living anyway.”

Balanchine’s work “made me think about life differently,” she said in the Ballet Review interview. “About how you should live, what you should care about. … Looking at art can be a whole life,” she continued, “where you don’t need anything more.”

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