Olivia Nuzzi’s debut book, American Canto, has been mercilessly panned by critics, who say it fails to deliver on the gossip and insight it promises. The memoir, which touches—albeit inconsistently—on her notorious affair with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has drawn scathing reviews from major publications in New York City, Washington, DC, and beyond.
Many reviewers complained that the book reveals too little about her strange liaison with Kennedy, while others criticized Nuzzi’s attempt to channel the late essayist Joan Didion, calling the effort a failure. The memoir was highly anticipated, fueled in part by gossip from Nuzzi’s ex-fiancé, political reporter Ryan Lizza, who publicly alleged that she had an affair with former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and planned to “consummate” her relationship with RFK Jr. Despite all the buzz, the book “drops with a soft, disappointing thud,” wrote Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times.
The Times described the memoir as “self-serious and altogether disappointing.” Jacobs noted that while Nuzzi, now Vanity Fair’s West Coast editor, tries to emulate Didion’s incisive observations on California life, her work ends up “chapterless and scattershot”—“an attempted letter from Trump’s America in the style of a would-be Joan Didion (on Adderall rather than Elavil).” The 303-page volume is “wafting and unfocused in a manner that makes you long for the sweet relief of a detailed policy paper,” she added. “Nuzzi is an astral force—but this moon’s a lead balloon,” Jacobs concluded.
The Washington Post was equally unforgiving. Reviewer Becca Rothfeld wrote that Nuzzi “tries and fails to save her reputation,” calling the memoir “what most debut books are: highly uneven and largely forgettable. To be sure, vast swaths of it are impressively and aggressively awful.” Rothfeld added that it reads like a Joan Didion pastiche, “worried and overworked in a way that Didion, a master of taut precision, would never have countenanced.” She also noted that when Nuzzi attempts to sound literary, her syntax is “tortured and halting,” and for readers unfamiliar with her headline-making affair, the narrative can seem “unintelligible.”
Helen Lewis of The Atlantic observed that the book attempts “to elevate a grubby affair to the status of the mythic, to transmute the base metal of Page Six sexting stories into the gold of literary reflections on the political moment.” But she concluded, “all the surf and smoke and Didionesque stylings in the world cannot disguise the central problem with American Canto: it is not honest.”
Similarly, The New Yorker’s Molly Fischer warned that readers hoping for juicy details about Nuzzi’s relationship with Kennedy “will be disappointed.” She described the book as rejecting chronology and coherence, making it difficult for even loosely informed readers to follow the story. Fischer added that Nuzzi’s reflections on the country range from “banal … to ridiculous.”
SOURCE: NEW YORK POST
