Olivia Nuzzi’s highly anticipated new book has received overwhelmingly negative reviews from critics.
The 32-year-old journalist — who’s been in the headlines for her sexting scandal with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which he’s denied — released her new book, “American Canto,” Tuesday.
According to its official description, the book 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.”
Although the description makes it clear the book is not a tell-all or memoir but rather, “a powerful personal history,” the Atlantic’s Helen Lewis slammed the books as a “tell-nothing memoir.”
“It is not honest,” the review reads. “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 New York Times headlined their review, “Olivia Nuzzi’s Memoir Is Self-Serious and Altogether Disappointing.”
“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,” Alexandra Jacobs’s review reads.
The Washington Post called the book ” highly uneven and largely forgettable.”
“To be sure, vast swaths of it are impressively and aggressively awful,” Becca Rothfeld’s review reads.
Rothfeld also criticized Nuzzi’s writing ability.
“When Nuzzi is trying to sound literary, as she often is, her syntax is tortured and halting,” the review notes.
Slate’s Scaachi Koul headlined her negative review, “Olivia Nuzzi’s Book Has the Audacity to Be Boring.”
“‘American Canto’ could have helped redeem her if only it was interesting,” the review reads. “Instead, it is illegible in ways you can’t imagine. Historians will study how bad this book is.”
The New Yorker noted that “readers looking for a clearer understanding of her involvement with Kennedy will be disappointed.”
“It is easy to imagine the narrator of ‘American Canto’ producing fan fiction about herself, because, in many cases, the book reads as if that’s what she’s doing,” reviewer Molly Fischer writes,
Nuzzi exited New York magazine after her alleged sexting scandal with Kennedy came to light, and she was was brought on as West Coast editor of Vanity Fair in September.
However, Page Six exclusively revealed she may already be out at the mag.
“It looks like they are getting rid of her,” one source told us.
Another source shared, “Even before this broke, she didn’t have a single story in the next two issues of the magazine. She never picked up her Condé Nast computer, never came to a meeting, never responded to an email she was cc’d on.”
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