Review of “American Canto” by Olivia Nuzzi – Insufferable filler that avoids the real issues | Autobiography books

DDoes he take me seriously? asks Olivia Nuzzi in the midst of her infamous alleged affair with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Nuzzi, then New York magazine’s Washington correspondent, learned that she and the politician, as RFK Jr. calls him in her new book, might overlap during a visit to Mar-a-Lago. Nuzzi, worried that Donald Trump will find out and start spreading rumors, holds an emergency meeting with the politician to strategize. RFK Jr. – who has denied having an affair with Nosy – does not see much significance.

“So she’s in pain.”Did he take me seriously? She reflects that she had “no good reason to consider the question before now.”

But as soon as this question came to Nuzi’s mind, it imprinted itself on her psyche. “American Canto” is part memoir, part political analysis. But it is, above all, a call from Nozi to be taken seriously; As a writer, thinker, person. This is not easy in the best of circumstances when you are, like Nozi, a young and conventionally attractive woman. Of course, it’s even more difficult when, like Nozi, you are a journalist who is making headlines for her alleged involvement in an inappropriate relationship with a famous subject. (Or, given the recent accusations made by Nosy’s ex-fiancé, Ryan Lisa, Topics.)

Nozi’s gaze: the doors it may open, the preconceptions it generates—as well as the misogynistic system within which it operates—is a recurring motif in American Canto, if frustratingly underexplored. She recounts that during her first meeting with Trump, he looked her up and down and said: “Very young and very beautiful.” Her reporting later angered the president and he publicly insulted Nozi, calling her “shaky and unattractive.” This shocked her, and she wrote about how strange it felt “that the President of the United States called me beautiful and unattractive.”

Then, at an exclusive party in D.C., Nuzzi is standing in the kitchen with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, a woman who has been name-checked perhaps because the United States takes her seriously, and an unidentified movie star approaches her and grabs Nuzzi’s face. “Olivia, the secret to life is to be rapeable,” she told me. “You are rapeable.” I left that contradictory tale to hang there, unexamined.

When Nozi’s alleged affair with the politician was revealed, in September 2024, the star reporter, someone who is hard to imagine being naive, seemed shocked at the way things were going. “The politician concocted a narrative in which my sexuality was not only compromised, but a hypersexual attraction trap,” she writes. Most disturbing, Nuzi says, were the blind quotes suggesting that she used her “appearance as a tool to manipulate while doing my job. Of the lies that were told about me, this was one of the hardest to believe.”

Nozi is right to be angry about the double standards applied to her; The way she was swept over the coals while a much older and more powerful man walked away from scandal and took a ministerial position. But “American Canto” would have been a better book if Nozi had interrogated her behavior. Instead, they ignore it. “Politics was, for a brief period, my topic,” she admits. But she says:[h]”It wasn’t my source.” She seems to see no wrongdoing on her part; She’s just angry that her privacy has been violated.

Nosy is also angry at the pleas to publish the dirt that the public (and her publisher, one imagines) so desperately wants. “I’ve thought about this phrase, Tell everyone, Often… tell what exactly? Tell me why exactly?” It’s fumes. Well, I think one reason might be selling some books. Tell everyone, the ones that actually Tellstend to sell.

However, there is not much to tell us in the American canto; Or not anything anyone wants to hear about, anyway. For the first 116 pages, Nuzzi is barely a politician after she loses her job at New York magazine and exiles herself to California. Instead, she writes about Madeleine Ruthven, a silent-era screenwriter, “being brought before Congress at the McCarthy hearings,” and then, in the next paragraph, about the victory of the North American tectonic plate over the Farallon tectonic plate “a hundred million years ago, give or take.” On the next page is a quote from Nietzsche. Then an excerpt from an interview with Trump. And it goes on like this: a series of American non-sequiturs, the aim of which seems to be to prove that Nozzi is a serious person who has serious ideas about the state of the United States and the “accepted reality” (she is very fond of that phrase) and should be taken seriously.

The alleged case, when it finally came to light, crept up. We know very little about RFK Jr., the man who, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, is systematically destroying decades of medical progress. Instead, we are told: “He wanted. He wanted desire. He wanted to be desired. He wanted desire itself.” She overthinks what is ultimately a sordid episode. For example, the politician asks Nuzzi for advice, and she says, “I dealt with his dilemma in a Socratic way.”

And while American Canto might suggest otherwise, Nozzi is not a bad writer. It can paint a vivid scene, pulling you somewhere. The places where it is located are important, as they are among the greatest centers of power in the world. Between all the pretensions, the unnecessary padding, and the insufferable prose, there are the bones of an excellent book. Maybe one day, if Nosy stops taking herself so seriously, we might be able to read her.