📚 Review: American Canto by Olivia Nuzzi

Olivia Nuzzi’s American Canto arrived with the pomp, circumstance, and trumpet flourishes of a coronation … and the sad  figures of a yard sale. Publishers gushed about a literary thunderclap. Vanity Fair polished her halo, The New York Times dimmed the lights for a soft-focus profile, and industry insiders predicted a first-week sales boom worthy of a Kennedy campaign rally. The publishing world was  bracing for a thunderclap, only to get smacked in the face with a damp squib: 1,165 copies slithered out the door, leaving warehouses echoing with the sound of unsold ambition and ego.

One critic, sharpening his  knives, declared it “a memoir so self-indulgent it makes Instagram captions look like Hemingway.” Another, less charitable, called it “the literary equivalent of sexting yourself in the mirror.”

The book hilariously insists on coyness, referring to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (the object of Nuzzi’s affections) only as “the politician,” as though such transparent anonymity could disguise a scandal already splashed across every gossip column in America.

Nuzzi’s prose, meanwhile, drifts into purple fog: “He was not quite mad the way they thought, but I loved the private ways that he was mad.” (Translation: He texted me at 3 a.m. and I thought it was poetry. )

“I loved that he was insatiable in all ways, as if he would swallow up the whole world just to know it better, if he could.”(Translation: He really liked sending long texts.)

Reviewers pounced. “This is not writing,” one sneered, “it is a scandle trying to describe its own fragrance.” Another sighed, “If madness is private, may it remain so — preferably behind a paywall.”

The fallout was operatic. Vanity Fair, once Nuzzi’s  West Coast sanctuary, suddenly discovered the concept of “mutual agreement” and let her contract expire. Ryan Lizza, her “cuckolded” ex-fiancé turned one-man Greek chorus, accused her of moonlighting as a political operative, his Substack posts ringing like derisive footnotes to every chapter, yet the more he wrote the smaller he looked, as though he had suddenly plunged into ice cold water.

Although the book’s title, American Canto, promised song, it delivered dirge. “It is less Whitman,” one reviewer wrote, “and more karaoke at closing time, after the bartender had  unplugged the machine.”

In the end, American Canto is not a memoir, nor a meditation, nor even a scandal worth savoring. It is a case study in hype devouring itself, a literary ouroboros choking on its own tail. The critics have spoken, the readers have fled, and the only canto left is the hollow refrain of unsold copies humming in the warehouse: a chorus of silence, punctuated by derision.

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