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Olivia Nuzzi\u2019s world<\/span> is populated by beasts, and by monsters.<\/p>\n \u201cAmerican Canto\u201d opens with cockroaches, and a call from The Politician. \u201cThe Politician\u201d is the tiring epithet Nuzzi uses throughout her memoir to reference Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the man with whom the whole world now knows she had some degree of affair. It ends with a red-tailed hawk and a drone, a juxtaposition that underscores the degree to which the journalist\u2019s life is now mediated by public interest in what was once private. In the 300-page course of \u201cCanto,\u201d birds of all feathers appear: the ravens Kennedy takes an interest in befriending (or subjugating), turkeys, swallows, cardinals, owls. President Donald Trump, the \u201ccharacter\u201d Nuzzi has spent one-third of her time on Earth serving as \u201cwitness\u201d to as a vocation, is \u201csophisticated\u201d but still an \u201canimal.\u201d (He is also, I\u2019m sorry to say, described in the phrase \u201ca Gemini nation under a Gemini ruler.\u201d)<\/p>\n What feels undebatable, in what\u2019s likely been a mad-dash Washington parlor game of decoding all the unnamed characters, is that Kennedy is one of the book\u2019s monsters. He is also, variously, a bull and a lion. We learn Kennedy in his human form is often shirtless. He was the \u201chunter\u201d (\u201cLike all men but more so,\u201d we read, mouths agape), and she was the prey. We know this because of an extended metaphor that begins with considering a baby bird pushed from a nest \u2014 Nuzzi recounts, briefly, her difficult relationship with an alcoholic and mentally ill mother \u2014 then \u201cswallowed up by some kind of monster\u201d where \u201cin her first and final act, she had made the monster stronger.\u201d Nuzzi means to tell us that she was the woman consumed, first by love, and then by a nation of gawkers who still can\u2019t look away.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m annoyed that I had to learn about any of this crap,\u201d comedian Adam Friedland tells Nuzzi in an interview for his eponymous show<\/a> released to his subscribers on Tuesday night. Friedland, who often serves as a conduit for his audience\u2019s own reactions, does seem actually annoyed, as I often felt while reading this book.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m sorry,\u201d Nuzzi replies, looking genuinely apologetic and mildly uncomfortable. <\/p>\n The revelations Nuzzi has been to hell and back to earn are gossamer-thin and so lightly worn, they float in on the Santa Ana winds and just as abruptly vanish.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n There\u2019s real insight to be gleaned about how the former<\/a> New York magazine journalist allowed herself to be used by a political project working to turn back the clock <\/a>on scientific progress by decades and result in more dead children, but that\u2019s not why Nuzzi is apologizing, or even writing this book. The greatest failing of \u201cAmerican Canto\u201d is its inability to look too far outside itself. The revelations we\u2019re meant to believe that Nuzzi has been to hell and back to earn are gossamer-thin and so lightly worn, they float in on the Santa Ana winds and just as abruptly vanish, uninterrogated. She often punctuates sentences, offset by commas, with the phrases \u201cI think\u201d or \u201cI suppose,\u201d lest we get the idea that she\u2019s holding onto anything too tightly.<\/p>\n Crucially, all this thinking about our messed-up country is only of interest because it has forcefully and publicly intersected with the author\u2019s personal life. In this way, it is perhaps the purest version of a Washington memoir<\/a> yet, one that pretends to be about America and about politics and our twisted state of play but is really an exercise in the writer gesturing <\/em>at these things with no appreciation for the real stakes of every policy decision<\/a> made by this administration for real people. It\u2019s all just a \u201ckaleidoscopic\u201d \u2014 Nuzzi\u2019s repeated word choice \u2014 backdrop for the media to use in a clever lede before getting back to who\u2019s up and who\u2019s down and who\u2019s interesting.<\/em><\/p>\n To emphasize this weightlessness, the author goes to great pains to remind us that, for all its flaws, such as electing an authoritarian with fascist ambitions not once but twice, she loves this country. (In the author\u2019s note that opens the book, Nuzzi proclaims the book is \u201cabout love \u2026 and about love of country.\u201d) There is plentiful red, white, and blue. Mentions of the flag are so numerous that I had to switch pens while underlining them. There are bullets and guns, including the loaded one that Nuzzi comes to keep on her nightstand. There is much discussion of God (Nuzzi, like Kennedy, was raised Catholic). Just a couple pages in, there is JonBen\u00e9t Ramsey \u2014 another beautiful blonde, Nuzzi seems to be saying, who became, against her will, an avatar for a greater spiritual rot at the core of American culture. <\/p>\n Like at least a few great writers before her, Nuzzi fled the East Coast for Los Angeles (specifically Malibu, where she is surrounded by both literal and metaphorical fires) after news of the affair broke. Once there, she compares herself to the Black Dahlia, drained of blood for an eager nation to see as she\u2019s bafflingly, symbolically hoisted above the Macy\u2019s Thanksgiving Day Parade.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n There is mercifully little Ryan Lizza, the journalist Nuzzi refers to as \u201cthe man I did not marry,\u201d who has proven she dodged a bullet by recounting his side of the story on his Substack (where, cleverly if cravenly, the first installment was free to draw readers in and subsequent numbered chapters have been paywalled). In the Friedland interview, Nuzzi denies Lizza\u2019s allegations that she covered up information about the Trump assassination attempt and that she caught and killed stories damaging to Kennedy. When the host presses her about why she won\u2019t sue her ex for defamation, Nuzzi points out that he rarely appears in the book, saying, \u201cLike, I forgot him,\u201d which is actually a pretty good burn. Lizza, who was fired from The New Yorker for \u201cimproper sexual conduct<\/a>\u201d (which he denies), has been let off in this saga far too easily; for all his yammering now, he did precious little to intervene when it actually might have mattered \u2014 say, during Kennedy\u2019s confirmation hearing.<\/p>\n \u201cThe discourse, right and left, is filled with people remarking.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n When Nuzzi dares to engage with substantive politics, it\u2019s in careful, distant terms. By my count, there was one mention of Gaza, in a headline \u2014 \u201cMayhem in Gaza\u201d \u2014 which she recounts only to give us a sense of time and of place. (It\u2019s worth noting that in the selected headline, \u201cmayhem\u201d reduces the genocide in Gaza to something like a natural disaster.) She witnesses a pickup truck (Real America!) covered in Make America Great Again stickers; she sees protesters holding signs that read \u201cSTOP ARMING ISRAEL.\u201d Nuzzi flattens it all. \u201cThe discourse, right and left, is filled with people remarking,\u201d she writes, affecting a detached tone that sounds like a discount Joan Didion. In another section, Nuzzi pictures herself being (metaphorically) hit in a drone strike, which feels, to put it mildly, a bit lacking in self-awareness in the year 2025.<\/p>\n It\u2019s all sound and fury, and to the chronicler of it all, it signifies absolutely nothing.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n
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