American Canto
Regrettably self-serious ... Amid the noise around Nuzzi, American Canto itself drops with a soft, disappointing thud ... Wafting and unfocused in a manner that makes you long for the sweet relief of a detailed policy paper, American Canto offers many scenes...but little sense ... Nuzzi is an astral force I can still see somehow hurtling triumphantly through the transformed media galaxy. But this moon’s a lead balloon.
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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 ... Does not tell all. Readers looking for a clearer understanding of her involvement with Kennedy will be disappointed ... It is hard for a reader to know what to make of Nuzzi in this mode. For one thing, her observations of the country veer from banal...to ridiculous ... Disappointingly, she seems to have abandoned the reportorial instincts that were once the basis of her success.
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In writing American Canto, while Nuzzi has broken her vow of silence — smashing it into smithereens and setting off a wave of public retribution by Lizza — she has succeeded brilliantly in her wish not to be understood. Nuzzi emerges less as someone who, in the words of her publisher, “walked through hell and she took notes,” but as a woman whose version of the events that laid her low remain stubbornly unprocessed — as blurry and borderless as the book itself ... In real life, Nuzzi may have risked it all, but as an author, she hasn’t been as fearless, using words as armor, not conduit. It’s an understandably protective posture, but not one that has produced a memoir of consequence.
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