In praise of Ann Goldstein

Today is a heartbreaking day at The New Yorker. Ann Goldstein, the head of our copy-editing department, is leaving the magazine after a quietly glorious forty-three-year career. Copy editing — two words — may sound to outsiders like a job of lesser significance, but it is, in fact, fairly monumental. The New Yorker has an idiosyncratic and byzantine array of house rules concerning style; I wrote some years back about the disconcerting experience of being edited by the legendary Eleanor Gould Packard. Ann has long been the supreme custodian of the sense of a New Yorker voice, and she has a way of applying those rules without disrupting the flow of a writer's thought. Indeed, being herself a writer and translator of great skill, she invariably makes the prose more elegant. It is as if a slightly blurry image were snapping into perfect focus. I learned as much about writing from Ann as from any teacher in school. (She would surely have improved that sentence.) The loss is made heavier by the recent departure of the no less beloved Mary Norris, another copy-editing mainstay. Not long ago, Mary embarked on a new career as an author, with her book Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. Ann, too, has lately moved into the limelight, with her acclaimed translations of Primo Levi and Elena Ferrante, among others. We New Yorker writers are tremendously happy for them, and yet it is difficult to say farewell to editors of such brilliance, not least because they make us all look better, one clarifying comma at a time. My own gratitude is limitless. "Almost limitless?" Ann might suggest, fearing imprecision. No, limitless.