Olivia Nuzzi’s New Book Gets Absolutely Pummeled by The New York Times and Other Critics: ‘Aggressively Awful’

AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

The reviews are in for Olivia Nuzzi’s new memoir, American Canto — and they do not scream “This is the next Joan Didion.”

Instead, the book, which was released on Tuesday, is being skewered as a melodramatic and “aggressively awful” bore, crammed with too many pointless “pseudo-literary affectations” and not enough dirt on the “digital” affair she had with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The big claim: RFK Jr. used ketamine.)

There has been a lot of Nuzzi coverage of late, as anyone who even loosely follows the media business could tell you; The New York Times gave her a rather glowing profile last month, for example. But Vanity Fair’s West Coast editor has become a recurring joke on X again, a year after her RFK Jr. romance was first reported, thanks to her ex-fiancé, political writer Ryan Lizza, dishing on their breakup on his Telos News blog.

Lizza has claimed Nuzzi had an affair with former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford (R), talked about her luxurious relationship with Keith “Sugar Daddy” Olbermann, and said Nuzzi and RFK Jr. “planned to consummate their relationship” at an Arizona hotel room in 2024 before Lizza caught wind of their affair.

Those sordid details are much more entertaining than anything in American Canto, based on a number of major reviews.

Here is a look at what a few of them said:

The New York Times

NYT’s Alexandra Jacobs called it a “regrettably self-serious” slog that, amid the controversy surrounding Nuzzi, “drops with a soft, disappointing thud.”

American Canto, Jacobs wrote, is “wafting and unfocused in a manner that makes you long for the sweet relief of a detailed policy paper.” She also said it frustratingly “for legal or literary reasons” gives “coy names” to people like “the Paparazzo,” “the Bodyguard,” and “the Politician,” which forces “the reader to Google and guess” who Nuzzi is writing about.

Jacobs summarized the book as a “303-page bafflement.”

“Nuzzi is an astral force I can still see somehow hurtling triumphantly through the transformed media galaxy,” Jacobs wrote. “But this moon’s a lead balloon.”

Washington Post

WaPo reviewer Becca Rothfeld called American Canto “what most debut books are: highly uneven and largely forgettable. To be sure, vast swaths of it are impressively and aggressively awful.”

Rothfeld continued, saying “When Nuzzi is trying to sound literary, as she often is, her syntax is tortured and halting: ‘I have only a flight instinct, and reporting, I never had to consider it until now, is a way of fleeing yourself.'”

She said RFK Jr. makes “only brief appearances” in the book, and for anyone unfamiliar with their affair before reading the book, those parts would seem “unintelligible.”

Rothfeld also slams Nuzzi for making “feverishly mixed” metaphors, like “It was as though the media was holding up a doll of me and gesturing at random to different parts in search of kindling to feed the fire of the story.” She said Nuzzi’s “pseudo-literary affectations” are “frequent and pointless.”

The reviewer also compared her unfavorably to Didion:

It reads like a Joan Didion pastiche — but it is worried and overworked in a way that Didion, a master of taut precision, would never have countenanced. “I mean to tell you of the canyon where voices carried. The place where monsters spoke to me,” Nuzzi writes. Why doesn’t she just tell us, then? Who cares if she means to?

The Atlantic

Helen Lewis roasted the book, saying it was “Nuzzi’s attempt to elevate a grubby affair to the status of the mythic, to transmute the base metal of Page Six sexting into the gold of literary reflections on the political moment.” That attempt bellyflopped, Lewis said.

“All the surf and smoke and Didionesque stylings in the world cannot disgust the central problem with American Canto: It is not honest,” she wrote.

The New Yorker

Molly Fischer warned readers who bought the book expecting it to be a tell-all “will be disappointed.” American Canto, she wrote, “does not tell all” and fails to give a “clearer understanding” of her involvement with RFK Jr.

Another problem: the book is also hard to read.

“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 wrote.

The insights are not much better, either.

“Her observations of the country veer from banal (it is violent, divided, both captivated and misled by images) to ridiculous (“JonBenét Ramsey said that if you are beautiful you may get killed in service to your country”).

Nuzzi also, “with breathtaking grandiosity,” uses “last winter’s Los Angeles wildfires as symbolism for her professional self-destruction.”

Fischer also compared Nuzzi unfavorably to Didion, saying “She has attempted to replicate the Didion image, while replacing cool observation with overheated drama.”