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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Ethically speaking, Nuzzi’s journalistic breach was grave: She had compromised her reporting by becoming intimately involved with a subject and a source. But as a piece of human drama, her lapse was gripping ... American Canto, Nuzzi’s much-anticipated attempt to write her way out of a reputational pit, is a scramble of fragments ... Incomprehensible ... 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. When Nuzzi is trying to sound literary, as she often is, her syntax is tortured and halting ... 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 ... A book that consisted solely of impressionistic dispatches from 10 years of reporting on Trump would have been good, perhaps even great, but it would also have been less splashy ... You shouldn’t write a memoir unless you are willing to make yourself look foolish and pathetic. Nuzzi breaks this cardinal rule, flattering herself by admitting to only the chicest kinds of disintegration.
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