The Reviews Are In For Nuzzi’s Book, And … Hoo Boy

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We’ve mostly avoided l’affaire Nuzzi, despite what it reveals about journalism these days, especially in the political sphere. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, though, Ace of Spades had the best extensive commentary on Olivia Nuzzi, celebrity journalism, and hiking the Appalachian Trail with political figures, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. 

Of course, that will hardly suffice as the last word on l’affaire Nuzzi, her fling with Mark Sanford and her sexting with Robert Kennedy Jr, all while covering both as a reporter. It won’t even suffice as a last word on her relationship with Ryan Lizza, which imploded after he discovered her infidelity. That’s because both Nuzzi and Lizza have competing narratives emerging over the last couple of weeks. Nuzzi has a supposedly frank memoir coming out titled American Canto, while Lizza is offering a counternarrative on his own platforms. 

We’ll get to Lizza’s attempt to pre-empt his former girlfriend in a moment. After Nuzzi basked in the Protection Racket Media’s attention for the last few weeks, these outlets got an advance look at American Canto. As Mediaite’s Sean James reports today, to call the reaction underwhelming among outlets already inclined towards sympathy for Nuzzi would be akin to calling Heaven’s Gate a near-miss at the box office:

The reviews are in for Olivia Nuzzi’s new memoir, American Canto — and they do not scream “This is the next Joan Didion.”

Instead, the book, which was released on Tuesday, is being skewered as a melodramatic and “aggressively awful” bore, crammed with too many pointless “pseudo-literary affectations” and not enough dirt on the “digital” affair she had with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (The big claim: RFK Jr. used ketamine.) …

Lizza has claimed Nuzzi had an affair with former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford (R), talked about her luxurious relationship with Keith “Sugar Daddy” Olbermann, and said Nuzzi and RFK Jr. “planned to consummate their relationship” at an Arizona hotel room in 2024 before Lizza caught wind of their affair.

Those sordid details are much more entertaining than anything in American Canto, based on a number of major reviews.

James isn’t kidding. He collates reviews from the most prestigious platforms in the mainstream media, such as the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. The consensus is that Nuzzi can’t write, has a desperately inflated sense of herself, is dishonest in her dishing, and unbearably pretentious. James does a fine job of collecting the excerpts, but I’ll offer condensed highlights here as well:

• NYT, Alexandra Jacobs: a “regrettably self-serious” slog that, amid the controversy surrounding Nuzzi, “drops with a soft, disappointing thud.” … a “303-page bafflement.” … “But this moon’s a lead balloon.” [This may be the most positive review in this collection — Ed] 
• WaPo, Becca Rothfeld: “what most debut books are: highly uneven and largely forgettable. To be sure, vast swaths of it are impressively and aggressively awful.” … Nuzzi’s “pseudo-literary affectations” are “frequent and pointless.”
• The Atlantic, Helen Lewis: “All the surf and smoke and Didionesque stylings in the world cannot disguise the central problem with American Canto: It is not honest,” she wrote.
• The New Yorker, Molly Fischer: “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”). … “with breathtaking grandiosity,” uses “last winter’s Los Angeles wildfires as symbolism for her professional self-destruction.”

The picture becomes clear: even the Left’s platforms can’t stand to read this book. One wonders how it got published at all, except to take advantage of Nuzzi’s scandals for monetization. Even on that score, however, Fischer warns that Nuzzi doesn’t really reveal much in the book about those scandals, while Lewis warns that what she purports to reveal isn’t reliable. 

What about Lizza? Anticipating the scrutiny that his relationship would receive, Lizza has tried pre-empting Nuzzi on his own platforms. Mediaite’ Colby Hall objected to this today, accusing Lizza of literary “revenge porn”:

Ryan Lizza released Part IV of his Substack saga on December 1, the night before Olivia Nuzzi’s American Canto lands. The timing said everything. He wasn’t adding a chapter; he was establishing the definitive version before hers could compete. And by the fourth installment, it was clear this wasn’t spontaneous grief processing — it was a sustained, serialized campaign designed to maximize impact and shape the public interpretation of a private collapse.

What he published is not journalism. It is an assertion of narrative power, the kind a veteran political reporter can summon automatically, even when the battlefield is his own life. The story itself is familiar by now: he discovered his fiancée’s involvement with Robert Kennedy Jr., collected the emotional wreckage, and assembled a multipart account from texts, memories, and confessions — all available or a tidy subscription fee.

The telling is the story. Lizza brought the entire architecture of political reporting to the ruins of his engagement — timelines, evidence files, reconstructed conversations, sourced records arranged for maximum persuasive effect. Private exchanges become exhibits; emotional disclosures take on the weight of deposition testimony. His breakup is laid out like a public scandal, complete with receipts and an implicit request for judgment.

Hall goes on to make a good point about the necessary “friction” of editorial oversight. He also concurs that Lizza and Nuzzi are essentially doing the same thing to each other and everyone around them. However, Hall does not offer much consideration to Nuzzi’s attempt to both monetize her own journalistic sins as well as leverage the negative attention it would put on Lizza while denying him any benefit from her work. It certainly looks more like Lizza saw the storm coming and made sure that his own “side” of this scandal got enough attention to compete with Nuzzi’s narrative. This isn’t “revenge porn” as much as it was a public-relations defense for whatever Nuzzi may have decided to include in her book about Lizza and his role in the scandal. 

That certainly doesn’t make Lizza particularly chivalrous, heroic, or even principled. It does, however, make him smart to get ahead of the storm. It seems highly unlikely that Lizza would have published this multi-part saga on his Substack platform at all had it not been for his former girlfriend’s decision to write a memoir about the scandal. 

In a way, however, it reminds me of the controversy between Nora Ephron and Carl Bernstein when Ephron wrote Heartburn, her thinly disguised memoir of her marriage to Bernstein in novel form that got turned into a movie starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson. Bernstein refrained from rebutting or fighting the publication, but he reportedly got Ephron to agree to limits on how he was portrayed. Perhaps Nuzzi and Lizza might have learned something in that example. As it stands, though, Lizza may just as well have not bothered, if these reviews are any indication. 

The latest episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast is now up! Today’s show features:

•  Republicans face a key special election in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional district. 
• Did Donald Trump take too long to get on the ground in Nashville? Andrew Malcolm and I lay oout the stakes for the GOP and Speaker Mike Johnson. 
• We also talk about Andrew’s dinner with William F. Buckley, and the column that Buckley wrote that never saw the light of day.  

The Ed Morrissey Show is now a fully downloadable and streamable show at  Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the TEMS Podcast YouTube channel, and on Rumble and our own in-house portal at the #TEMS page!

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