When the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk was arrested last September, one of his neighbors was asked what he thought. He said he was “blind to the world.” I’ve taken this up for myself. Barring a five-day binge of monitoring several situations last week, I’ve remained blind to the world for a long time. It’s nice, I recommend it. You can’t avoid certain events, like presidential elections and debates, but both of those were extremely entertaining last year, so I feel good, like Joe Walsh: life’s been good to me ever since I put up the blinders.
I didn’t know who Olivia Nuzzi was until her book American Canto was published last month. I heard of her, and must’ve read some of the work she’s written over the last decade, but I’ve never been that interested in politics. It’s more often than not extremely boring. I was surprised by how many people, left and right, were upset by the “decorum” of January 6, 2021. They didn’t like people walking in and sitting in the Speaker’s seat and putting their fest up on desk. Nuzzi writes in her book that Donald Trump’s own people were “horrified” of the masses of MAGA supporters, “disgusted” by their disregard for the architecture of Washington, DC. You get the sense that Nuzzi was, too, but American Canto makes nothing clear.
Nuzzi, who spent nearly a decade following, interviewing, and reporting on President Trump and his administration, is a talented writer stuck in an artless world. Her peers, like Helen Lewis in The Atlantic, slammed her book for “literary pretensions,” as if they could ever even attempt something like this. American Canto is a big swing (beginning with the title), and the prose isn’t as controlled or as tight as Joan Didion, the book’s most obvious stylistic influence. It’s an easy insult for drive-by critics, but again, most political writers couldn’t write a children’s book if they tried. Nuzzi isn’t fully formed as a prose stylist, but she’s an interesting and strange writer, no matter how messy parts of the book are.
People accused her of writing the book in a hurry, and that it was “revisionist.” I honestly had no idea about this woman’s rise and apparent fall. I did see a tweet that said that American Canto only sold 1165 copies by the end of 2025. That’s not that bad in publishing today, and whoever wrote that story knows it, and they resent Nuzzi for something I still don’t know about. If she ever “felched” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., you won’t find out about it in American Canto. You won’t even read his name—he’s “the Politician,” just as Charlie Kirk is “the man who would be assassinated” and Elon Musk is “the South African Billionaire,” and Donald Trump is, who else, “the President.” American Canto isn’t written in chronological order, and because Nuzzi covered Trump for so long, she was around the same reporters and personalities “for a third” of her life.
American Canto is one of the only books of the Trump era that can stand on its own as a work of art without being completely overshadowed by the 45th and 47th President. Nuzzi doesn’t have Trump Derangement Syndrome—far from it. She’s friends with Trump (he calls her “Livvybaby.”) I still don’t know exactly what happened between Nuzzi and RFK, Jr., but I don’t really care, nor do I care about Nuzzi’s reputation. Even if she slept with the whole cabinet, she got a great book out of it. The political press apparently holds the “affair”—I still don’t know if they fucked or not—against Nuzzi, as if she or they had any “objectivity” to compromise. American Canto is an exemplary book of the Trump era because it has no pretense of being objective and it isn’t concerned with being “neat” or polite.
Nuzzi’s book is in line with political-pop culture artifacts like Primary Colors, and the late-1960s and early-1970s work of Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson. American Canto has been endlessly compared to Joan Didion simply because Nuzzi’s a woman; besides sounding a bit hyperbolic, comparing someone to Mailer or Thompson might sound like an insult today (or in the years 2014-2024). But there isn’t much difference between Mailer calling himself “Aquarius” and Nuzzi calling Charlie Kirk “the man would be assassinated.” If American Canto struggles to find an audience, it’s not only because the only people who actually read it are Nuzzi’s mostly jealous peers—the book flatters no one. For a Millennial, Nuzzi is refreshingly unsentimental and isn’t concerned with appearing like “a good person.”
It’s hard to imagine a world without President Donald Trump. He’s the most overwhelming public figure in my lifetime. Barring aliens, the apocalypse, or an alien apocalypse, he’ll likely remain the single most significant person of our time. After reading American Canto, I somehow know more and less about the President and Nuzzi than before. It’s a similar effect that Roger Lewis achieved two years ago with Erotic Vagrancy, his massive study of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Nuzzi’s generation has been conditioned to believe that literature’s dead and therefore not worth pursuing; it follows that anyone who chooses to write despite all of that must be either an idiot or impossibly full of themselves. That so few people are even willing to try what Nuzzi did with American Canto speaks to how passive, cowardly, and uninspired the Millennial Generation remains.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NickyOtisSmith