Olivia Nuzzi Is Completely Oblivious |
Olivia Nuzzi’s world is populated by beasts, and by monsters.
“American Canto” opens with cockroaches, and a call from The Politician. “The Politician” is the tiring epithet Nuzzi uses throughout her memoir to reference Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the man with whom the whole world now knows she had some degree of affair. It ends with a red-tailed hawk and a drone, a juxtaposition that underscores the degree to which the journalist’s life is now mediated by public interest in what was once private. In the 300-page course of “Canto,” birds of all feathers appear: the ravens Kennedy takes an interest in befriending (or subjugating), turkeys, swallows, cardinals, owls. President Donald Trump, the “character” Nuzzi has spent one-third of her time on Earth serving as “witness” to as a vocation, is “sophisticated” but still an “animal.” (He is also, I’m sorry to say, described in the phrase “a Gemini nation under a Gemini ruler.”)
What feels undebatable, in what’s likely been a mad-dash Washington parlor game of decoding all the unnamed characters, is that Kennedy is one of the book’s monsters. He is also, variously, a bull and a lion. We learn Kennedy in his human form is often shirtless. He was the “hunter” (“Like all men but more so,” we read, mouths agape), and she was the prey. We know this because of an extended metaphor that begins with considering a baby bird pushed from a nest — Nuzzi recounts, briefly, her difficult relationship with an alcoholic and mentally ill mother — then “swallowed up by some kind of monster” where “in her first and final act, she had made the monster stronger.” Nuzzi means to tell us that she was the woman consumed, first by love, and then by a nation of gawkers who still can’t look away.
“I’m annoyed that I had to learn about any of this crap,” comedian Adam Friedland tells Nuzzi in an interview for his eponymous show released to his subscribers on Tuesday night. Friedland, who often serves as a conduit for his audience’s own reactions, does seem actually annoyed, as I often felt while reading this book.
“I’m sorry,” Nuzzi replies, looking genuinely apologetic and mildly uncomfortable.
The revelations Nuzzi has been to hell and back to earn are gossamer-thin and so lightly worn, they float in on the........