In addition to not being a tell-all, “American Canto” is not a book about Trump, nor is it about politics, as Nuzzi establishes in an author’s note. Rather, “it is a book about life in America as I have lived and observed it, and about the nature of our reality, and about character,” she explains. “It is also a book about love, because everything is about love, and about love of country.” She plays the pretensions of her title straight: she reports that she’s been reading Dante.
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 (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”). Her tone, especially in relation to Kennedy, is that of insistent sincerity. “I loved his brain,” she writes, of the man who was said to have a parasitic brain worm. “I hated the idea of an intruder therein.” With breathtaking grandiosity, she enlists last winter’s Los Angeles wildfires as symbolism for her professional self-destruction.
Trump might have turned everyone around him “into actors,” but Nuzzi seems to have always understood herself to be playing a role. “American Canto” touches briefly on her time as a child actor while growing up in New Jersey. September 11, 2001, was one of the days when 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 recalls, “I had dressed in a more considered and colorful way than I ordinarily would. . . . I thought of this as dressing up as a regular child, playing the child.” Later, as a teen-ager, she attempted to launch a music career under the name Livvy. (Although the book does not discuss the episode, Kennedy does call her by that name, as does her father.) Livvy was to be a sort of pop star in quotation marks, “a multi-media character,” according to her MySpace page. A 2010 press release for her first single, “Jailbait,” explained that the song was “about the role of the underaged, hyper-sexualized girl in society,” in its creator’s words. “It’s about pornographic ideals infiltrating our collective consciousness—this obsession with youth and beauty. I’m not saying that any of this is wrong. I’m simply stating that it is.” (“I’ll give you just enough, and leave you wanting more,” she sings, in the pre-chorus.) This is the same spirit of have-it-both-ways 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 tawdry appetites.
In “American Canto,” Nuzzi characterizes the public dénouement of her involvement with Kennedy as a “story in which I was cast against my will.” She objects to being seen as a “leopard-clad star reporter”—notwithstanding an old red-carpet photo that ran alongside much of her news coverage, she writes, she generally wore all black. I hesitate to take at face value Lizza’s account of Nuzzi’s behavior, but a specific detail sticks in my mind: he recounts finding a “tabloid-style news story” she wrote in which she describes herself as a “blonde beauty” and “one of the most famous political reporters in America.” 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. “He threw himself onto the bed, his pink shirt unbuttoned, revealing my favorite parts of his chest,” Nuzzi writes, of a conversation with Kennedy.
Nuzzi maintains publicly that she does not wish to be on the receiving end of press attention: “That I have made of myself what others have determined to be Good Copy is a horror.” Still, she shows a certain zest for tricks of the trade. She is lavish with explanations of not especially esoteric terms like “opposition research” and “getting ahead of a story.” When a newspaper reporter calls for comment about the Kennedy rumors, Nuzzi tells her it’s “such bullshit”—but only off the record:
