In addition to not revealing everything, “American Canto” is not a book about Trump, nor about politics, as Nuzzi establishes in an author’s note. “Rather, it is a book about life in America as I have experienced and observed it, about the nature of our reality and our character,” she explains. “It’s also a book about love, because it’s all about love and love of country.” She plays frankly the pretensions of her title: she reports that she has read Dante.
It’s difficult for a reader to know what to make of Nuzzi in this mode. On the one hand, his observations of the country go from the banal (it is violent, divided, both captivated and misled by the images) to the ridiculous (“JonBenét Ramsey said that if you are beautiful, you risk being killed in the service of your country”). His tone, particularly towards Kennedy, is one of insistent sincerity. “I loved his brain,” she wrote of the man said to have a parasitic brain worm. “I hated the idea of an intruder inside.” With breathtaking grandeur, she uses last winter’s Los Angeles wildfires as a symbol of her professional self-destruction.
Trump may have turned everyone around him into “actors,” but Nuzzi seems to have always understood that she was playing a role. “American Canto” briefly touches on her time as a child actress while growing up in New Jersey. September 11, 2001, was one of the days her mother was supposed to pick her up early from school to go “to a studio in SoHo or a theater in Midtown” for auditions. That morning, she recalled, “I had dressed in a more thoughtful and colorful way than I usually would. . . . I thought of it as dressing like an ordinary child, child play.” Later, as a teenager, she attempted to launch a music career under the name Livvy. (Although the book is not about the episode, Kennedy calls her by that name, as does her father.) Livvy was intended to be a sort of pop star, quote-unquote, “a multimedia character,” according to her MySpace page. A 2010 press release for its first single, “Jailbait,” explained that the song was about “the role of the underage, hypersexualized girl in society,” in the words of its creator. “It’s about pornographic ideals seeping into our collective consciousness – this obsession with youth and beauty. I’m not saying any of this is false. I’m just saying that it is. (“I’ll give you just enough, and leave you wanting more,” she sings, in the pre-chorus.) It’s the same spirit of two-way half-irony that Nuzzi’s critics saw in her reporting on Trump’s Washington — a writer with her eyebrow raised just enough to show she knows better, even as she caters to rowdy appetites.
In “American Canto,” Nuzzi describes the public unraveling of her involvement with Kennedy as a “story into which I was thrown against my will.” She is opposed to being considered a “ star journalist” – despite an old red carpet photo that accompanied much of her media coverage, she writes, “she usually wore black. I hesitate to take Lizza’s account of Nuzzi’s behavior at face value, but one specific detail sticks out in my mind: He says he found a “tabloid-style report” she wrote in which she described herself as a “blonde beauty” and “one of America’s most famous political journalists.” It’s easy to imagine the narrator of “American Canto” produce fanfiction about herself, because, in many cases, the book reads as if that’s what she was doing “He threw himself on the bed, his pink shirt unbuttoned, revealing my favorite parts of his chest,” Nuzzi writes of a conversation with Kennedy.
Nuzzi publicly states that she does not wish to be the subject of press attention: “That I have made of myself what others have determined to be good copy is a horror. » She nevertheless shows a certain taste for the tricks of the trade. It is full of explanations of not particularly esoteric terms like “opposition research” And “get ahead of a story.” When a reporter asked him to comment on the Kennedy rumors, Nuzzi replied that they were “bullshit” – but only off the record:
