Olivia Nuzzi’s “American Canto” Is a Brilliant Camp Masterpiece

Olivia Nuzzi’s much-maligned memoir American Canto opens with a phone call and a cockroach rave. Stomping down Fifth Avenue in front of the Met, Nuzzi argues with croaky-voiced bear-crime-scene-stager and whale-beheader Robert F. Kennedy Jr…I mean, The Politician…about whether their long-shot presidential candidate x political journalist affair is wrong (it is). Answering his invocation of his storied political dynasty family with a zinger, “I was not Jacqueline Bouvier and he was not John F. Kennedy” (that’s for sure), she looks down. At her feet are “dozens and dozens” of roaches, which she interprets as “a parade, a stampede, a rally, a rave.” Within the chaos of this roach disco, Nuzzi finds camaraderie: “When your world is falling apart, you walk forward. The cockroach, six legs and six claws, understands this.” Wait…roaches HAVE claws?!

That’s just the first page. By the second, Nuzzi rambles in a nine-line-long sentence about the eternal tabloid death and resurrection of JonBenét Ramsey. By the third, she plunks down a random quote from St. John of the Cross. I had to slam the book shut, along with my eyes, in an attempt to ground myself, not to spiral into the atmosphere in a fit of literary ecstasy. Olivia, girl, you are speaking my language! And that language is camp!

Yes, American Canto is a berserk masterpiece of literary camp, a gloriously unglued and decidedly delusional ride through the smoldering ruins of both Donald Trump’s United States as it fractures and reforms in his image and Nuzzi’s personal life as she cinematically flees the shitstorm of her affair with The Politician by driving around the sometimes-burning Los Angeles landscape in her Mustang. At first, I laughed my way through the over-the-top theatricality and nutty incoherence of the book. Yet as more time passes, the more and more I’m convinced that American Canto is actually brilliant.

I realize I’m alone here on the pro-Canto side. In an awkward interview with The Bulwark’s Tim Miller last week, Nuzzi explained she was writing for “the smartest person in the room.” Looks like it’s just me, girl! All last week, I devoured the slew of scathing negative reviews with confusion as critics deemed the book “boring,” “aggressively awful,” “illegible,” so wretched that “historians will study how bad this book is,” and “self-indulgent.” Ok, the last one is right. But we’ve never had a problem with self-indulgence here on Filthy Dreams! With the other slams, I keep wondering if I read a different copy of the book! Sure, American Canto is a chaotic mess of fragmented, chapter-less vignettes, postcards from a shattered mind and country as they both tip toward pure insanity. And yes, every new passage is a complete and utter surprise. The following vignette could be a long ramble from Donald Trump about the meaning of the word “rosebud” in Citizen Kane (“maybe the most significant word on film”); an unconvincing attempt to pretend he read Hillbilly Elegy; a surreal scene from the Oval Office in which a soon-to-be fired chief-of-staff plays exaggerated chummy buddy-buddy with various other Trump administration officials, including his rumored replacement and the vice president, in an evident song-and-dance routine just for Nuzzi; a random quote from Jordan Peterson about seeing cathedrals in an Evian bottle; the entire court report about Paul Pelosi getting beaned with a hammer; laughable attempts at lyrical contemplation about manta rays; a memory of an unnamed actress grabbing Nuzzi’s face and calling her “rapeable”; an anecdote about a convenience store worker deeming Diet Coke “Girl Dinner”; a namecheck of a lotion called Brazilian Bum Bum cream; a description of a disappointed racoon who tragically washes a dissolving ball of cotton candy; the disturbing memory of tasting Max Azzarello’s self-immolated flesh in the air in Lower Manhattan; a hilarious musing about macro vs. microplastics in the body of an augmented LA woman; or a glimpse of what she thought was a Border Patrol car actually being the “BOOTY PATROL.” How could a book that holds all of THIS be boring?! Completely unmoored, sure. But, boring?!!! I was buckled in and willing to go wherever Nuzzi took me!

I also realize that I was primed to like American Canto more than most. First, Nuzzi’s coverage of Trump’s first administration and his Norma Desmond-like behavior post-2020 loss is the most astute commentary on Trump’s uniquely absurd and wholly American version of monstrosity I’ve read. Not to mention her Bloody Mary-fueled, unzipped profile of shambolic drunk Rudy Giuliani. Her wry tone, which makes even the destruction of our doomed democratic experiment hilarious, was the closest thing I’ve ever read to Filthy Dreams in a mainstream publication (You’re always welcome to write for us, honey!). Nuzzi repurposes a lot of her former reporting on Trump here, highlighting her singularly amusing attention to detail like Trump’s so-soft-they’re-wet hands, his “spool of gold” hair, his habit of mocking cabinet secretaries in group chats that include the mockee, or his circular monologues, or as he calls it, “The Weave,” including one memorable exchange in which he reflects on the risk of being assassinated, by beginning with “I always think about it” and concluding with, “I don’t think about that.” Really, the entire book could be a treatise on his wet hands, and I’d be satisfied.

Secondly, I’m just not all that scandalized by Nuzzi’s affair with RFK Jr. I assume affairs between politicians and journalists happen a lot more than we’ll ever know. Should Nuzzi have lost her job at New York Magazine over it? Yeah, probably, you can’t be doing that while reporting on the guy and his incoming administration. But, I also don’t think we need to drag her through the streets with an A permanently pinned to her chest. The media reaction feels from an older period of public shaming women, especially the furious devouring of her ex-fiancé Ryan Lizza’s scorned lover Substack without noting that he, too, is suspect as a #MeToo-ed creep who got the boot from The New Yorker for “improper sexual conduct” (They hire a lot of weirdos there, huh…). Mostly, Nuzzi’s crime seems to be twofold: she picked the wrong man, an anti-vax, beef tallow-hocking huckster who, unfortunately, now has control over Health and Human Services. But to me, having an affair with the worst, most weathered Kennedy is kind of iconic; it’s straight out of a Lana Del Rey song. Her second offense is that she wrote the wrong book about it, or at least, the book that critics demanded from her. They wanted a tell-all of shocking, lurid details about Kennedy’s kinks that would somehow bring the Cabinet Secretary down. As if public scandal would unseat any Trump administration official in 2025! Let’s be real. Our Secretary of “War” frequently acts publicly drunk while ordering double-tap war crimes against random boats to satisfy our Secretary of State’s South Florida grudge, while the president hot-glues more gold garbage to the wall of the Oval Office. It’s not happening.

Nuzzi’s mutually obsessed melodrama with Bobby, here called “The Politician,” is just one of the many (many, many, many) narrative threads that weave through the winding road of American Canto. And that’s just fine with me. I don’t know how much more I could take of The Politician frequently bursting into tears about how much he loves her; equating being with her to the feeling of freedom when falling off a horse as a child; sending uncomfortably manipulative texts, like “You make me unhinged” or “I would take a bullet for you,” a particularly uncomfortable amorous exchange given his family history; attempting to befriend a raven; blinking in silence when confronted about his dead bear antics; writing love poetry; smoking DMT like he’s Terence McKenna trying to visit with the machine elves; and yanking an apple bit from his teeth with floss. The best part of Nuzzi’s The Politician segments is not her camp consternation at having to contemplate his brain worm (“I loved his brain. I hated the idea of an intruder therein”); it’s her brother’s much-needed dose of reality after she divulges the affair to him: “The guy with the fucked-up voice?… It’s not daddy issues, right?” We all wonder, Liv!

But American Canto isn’t about The Politician. It’s not even really about Olivia Nuzzi. She’s set her sights on a point bigger and more complex than that. It’s about Donald Trump, specifically Donald Trump as a vortex around which everyone in his periphery has morphed into players in an elaborate, country-wide performance for one man who is both creator and audience. Even if you don’t like the messenger, she’s not wrong. Think of the bizarre social media videos of dumpy gaitor-masked ICE Gestapo assaulting and kidnapping landscapers set to Sabrina Carpenter songs. It’s all a violent, content-driven show produced for an audience of one. Several times in the book, Nuzzi emphasizes that to fully comprehend Trump means always remembering that he wanted to be in the movie business. I’d add Broadway, too, with his single failed production of Paris Is Out! Instead of making it on the big screen or stage, Trump, instead, flipped Trump Tower’s Apprentice soundstage into campaign headquarters and turned D.C., and, well, the United States as a whole into his own personal show. Trump is, of course, the star of this production, and Nuzzi selects some amusingly telling anecdotes about Trump’s ham-fisted acting, like giddily asking an advisor, “Didn’t you love that?… It just came to me in the moment!” after lobbing a balled-up newspaper at a general.

Nuzzi emphasizes Trump’s centrality in this swirling mass of lunacy by rendering him almost the only person in the book named directly. There are a few exceptions, like fellow genius Trump profiler, Maggie Haberman, who appears in a dialogue equating Trump to Harold and the Purple Crayon. The Politician isn’t the only persona that gets a pseudonym here. There’s The MAGA General, The Failed Candidate, The Personality, The Bodyguard, the South African tech billionaire, etc. While it’s an entertaining folly to attempt to guess the person behind the name (MAGA General= Steve Bannon; Failed Candidate = Kari Lake; South African tech billionaire is obvious; I haven’t figured out The Personality yet, but I want it to be Tucker Carlson as he, even in his probably warranted paranoia, is quite protective of Nuzzi), it doesn’t really matter who these people are. They aren’t real per se; They’re playing a role, one that could be inhabited by other individuals if these actors exited the stage. There is something in her withering depictions of these performers, along with her meandering style, that reminds me of Gary Indiana’s novels like Rent Boy and Do Everything in the Dark, in which he skewers Lower Manhattan luminaries like Kathy Acker or Susan Sontag through barely veiled “fictional” characters. And before the experimental fiction set clutches their pearls, take one scene in which Nuzzi attends a coke-huffing party in LA. Sick of snorting off a ceramic plate, she moves the chopped lines to her book, which inspires “a personal trainer who, for reasons not explained to me, goes by a single initial,” to ask her if the novel is good, and then replies, “I’m just getting into reading!” If that’s not an Indiana-ism, I don’t know what is.

Like Indiana, the narrator here isn’t exempt from the biting critique. Nuzzi, too, plays a role in this Trumpworld production, a particularly camp one. She’s the blonde femme fatale, known in the press as the “vixen” in the red and leopard-print dress, running from the paparazzi and hovering drone surveillance in her sports car, getting kicks from the door popping open on the freeway and contemplating the call of the void. She quotes Hitchcock (“Blondes make the best victims. They’re like virgin snow that shows up in bloody footprints”). She invokes Britney, Pamela, and Marilyn (another Kennedy victim). She’s a woman in trouble, as per David Lynch, who also gets a plunked-in quote here. This self-depiction is what has really ruffled critics’ feathers, specifically one furious Slate writer. Is it aggravatingly self-aggrandizing? Maybe, but it’s also deeply camp. And I’m not even sure if it’s intentional, if this is naive camp or deliberate camp. On some level, she has to be aware. I mean, she frequently references her designer clothing, like standing on the edge of a ditch in Prada as sheriff department officers attempt to unstick her car from a rut after attending a no-show Stop the Steal trucker envoy. The writing is also so overly affected that it reaches the level of sublime artifice, as she squeezes as much inspo as possible from the Los Angeles landscape like a wannabe Joan Didion with a bottle of coke on her mantle. Even outside of the burnt-out husks of Malibu mansions, her shorter musings, like “People often, often people I do not know very well, reach out to tell me that I have appeared in their dreams. I wonder if this is because I sleep so little”: “I have never cared for the energies of the East River”; or “In Wisconsin, at Green Lake, police said a man faked his own death. When I read this, I smiled. He was free,” feel straight out of Lana Del Rey’s poetry collection Violet Bent Backward Over the Grass. Then, there are the hysterical glamour shots of the author, appearing as a wind-whipped platinum-haired waif in gigantic sunglasses, peppered throughout the promotional excerpt of the book in Vanity Fair. These photos were so transcendently camp, I couldn’t even focus on the words. Good thing, because the excerpt is horribly cobbled together from the already spotty memoir.

All of which contributes to the unreality of Nuzzi as a person, her story, and the book as a whole, as reality becomes increasingly indistinguishable from fiction and vice versa, like Nuzzi’s affair with The Politician evolving into a Law & Order episode. This mirrors what Nuzzi calls “the distortion outbreak” occurring in the United States under Donald Trump, as reality and fiction collide with a wannabe movie and theater producer, reality show host, and WWE Hall of Fame inductee as leader. The latter inspires a delightful interlude in which Nuzzi attempts to visit the WWE Hall of Fame only to learn from a blasé receptionist that it doesn’t exist in the physical realm, but is an idea, a perfect representation of the kayfabe at the heart of this American show. This unreality isn’t just for the Trump fanatics, the ones losing their minds at the MAGA rallies, which she perfectly observes as, “a kaleidoscope of red and red and red and red and blue and white, of hats and flesh and flags and fistfights and fast food and rhinestones, a borderless mass with one heart beating very fast, dancing to ‘Y.M.C.A’.” His detractors also have lost their grounding, which leads an unnamed director to assert that Trump’s Butler assassination looked like “prop blood,” like the numerous people who told me last year that they thought Trump staged his own shooting. At the time, I remember feeling unmoored by the entry of Blue Anon into my orbit. Like oh Christ, YOU’RE a lunatic too!

Like any true cracked nut, Nuzzi sees this distortion as running in endless loops, the ouroboros or Nietzsche’s eternal return. A sucker for flat circles, I can be convinced of this theory. While she also takes a spin around Lee Greenwood—“God Bless the U.S.A” projected over the River Plaza Elementary School in a fit of post-9/11 patriotic fervor, playing again as Trump meanders onstage at his MAGA rallies, and printed in a scam Bible sold by both Greenwood and Trump, this is best shown through the eternal recurrence of Trump himself. Hasn’t he always been a constant presence in our lives? Always in or just outside of frame somehow? Early on, Nuzzi recalls initially encountering the idea of Trump when she was six years old in traffic with her father, with Trump’s town car nearby. She also takes a woozy whirl in the atrium of Trump Tower, years after his racist golden escalator entry into politics:

“Time folded, stretched, turned. I turned on the heel of my pink Gucci stilettos from where I was standing, outside the façade of the Gucci store in the atrium, to face the fabled golden escalator. In my mind, the stilettos morphed into the black Prada stilettos I had been wearing the day when I first stepped onto the marble here.”

The dizzying merry-go-round of The Donald is hard to write about without sounding batshit bonkers, which Nuzzi unquestionably does, and I probably do as well. But fuck it, she’s right. Couldn’t we all do some version of this? Trump in Home Alone 2. Eating stale bagels in the nasty, dirty Trump café. Laughing at Omarosa’s diva nastiness on The Apprentice. Visiting the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. Watching Trump’s political rise and fall and rise again. Laughing at the gigantic butt prints left on the Starbucks couches in the Trump Tower atrium. Going to 45 Wine and Whiskey. Trying to go to 45 Wine and Whiskey, only to find it closed. Going to 45 Wine and Whiskey again. Attending the Madison Square Garden Trumpamania. Visiting the White House and gazing at a portrait of his bloodied face in Butler, a county not too far from where I grew up. There’s no telling how many more turns we have to go on this ride, but of any book I’ve read, American Canto captures its incoherence, its ridiculousness, its horror, and yes, its camp.