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Former New York Magazine journalist Olivia Nuzzi’s new book “American Canto” is being panned by reviewers as a disappointment and even “aggressively awful.”
Nuzzi has received extensive attention ahead of the release of the book over her alleged romantic digital relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom she covered on the 2024 campaign trail. According to the publisher’s description, it is, “A mesmerizing firsthand account of the warping of American reality over the past decade as Donald Trump has risen to dominance – from a participatory witness who got so far inside the distortion field that it swallowed her whole.”
The description says the book is not a tell-all nor a memoir, though its release comes after she parted ways with New York Magazine over her alleged relationship with Kennedy. Nuzzi previously published a profile on Kennedy as he was campaigning for the presidency in 2023. The journalist, who now serves as Vanity Fair’s West Coast editor, was also recently accused by her ex-fiancé, Ryan Lizza, of having a romantic relationship with former Republican South Carolina Gov. and Rep. Mark Sanford.
Alexandra Jacobs of The New York Times wrote, “Wafting and unfocused in a manner that makes you long for the sweet relief of a detailed policy paper, ‘American Canto’ offers many scenes — a flag factory staffed by immigrants, an open highway, the Oval Office — but little sense.” The Times headlined the review, “Olivia Nuzzi’s Memoir Is Self-Serious and Altogether Disappointing.”
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Liberal New York Times column Michelle Goldberg published a piece about the book and the news about Nuzzi in general on Tuesday.
She called Nuzzi out for what she describes as a lack of introspection with regard to allegedly becoming involved with Kennedy, the subject of one of her profiles.
“An odd thing about the book — one that gives it an aloof, affectless quality — is that Nuzzi doesn’t seem to recognize that her collaboration with Kennedy was a grave professional betrayal,” Goldberg wrote. “Her total lack of introspection, at least on the page, is vaguely uncanny.”
Kennedy has denied having a physical relationship with Nuzzi.
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The Washington Post’s review deemed the book “forgettable,” in a piece headlined “Olivia Nuzzi tries and fails to save her reputation in ‘American Canto.'”
“A public hungry for scandal might be more satisfied if ‘American Canto’ were uniformly excellent or uniformly terrible. But in our unsatisfying reality, it is what most debut books are: highly uneven and largely forgettable. To be sure, vast swaths of it are impressively and aggressively awful,” the reviewer wrote.
The New Yorker headlined the piece about her book, “Does Olivia Nuzzi make good copy?” The sub-headline read, “Across social media, definitely. In her new memoir, ‘American Canto,’ not so much.”
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In that piece, Molly Fischer wrote that “amid the tumult of gossip, ‘American Canto’ arrives as a peculiar artifact. It refuses chronology and coherence, which makes it a challenge to extract answers to any of the many questions a reader loosely aware of her story might have.”
Fischer said that the book wasn’t a tell-all, which is acknowledged in its description, and said “Readers looking for a clearer understanding of her involvement with Kennedy will be disappointed.”
The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis branded the book a “tell-nothing” in her review. However, she said the book was better than Nuzzi’s rollout.
“But all the surf and smoke and Didionesque stylings in the world cannot disguise the central problem with American Canto: It is not honest. In the book, Nuzzi rails against those who urge her to tell all. ‘I do not wish to be understood,” she writes, “which no one seems to understand.’ This is a very good reason not to write and publish a memoir,” The Atlantic’s review read.
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Lewis called it a first draft and a “down payment” on a career following the scandals plaguing her career.
“American Canto was written too early, and too quickly. It is a first draft, hastily typed into a smartphone; a bargaining chip to gain favorable news coverage; a down payment on a post-scandal career. A tell-all memoir? Ha. This is a tell-nothing memoir. Instead, it is a portrait of losing your soul—of discovering, as Nuzzi quotes from Nietzsche, that when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you,” she wrote.
Nuzzi did not immediately return Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
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