American Canto: this ‘tell-all’ memoir on RFK Jr says nothing
Published amid controversy over Olivia Nuzzi’s alleged entanglement with Robert F. Kennedy Jr, American Canto promises a window into US politics. But does it deliver?
American Canto is a new memoir of a love affair between a young woman and a much older man. Everyone in America seems to be reading it, in part because one of the main characters is a Kennedy.
But do Australians need to read a book so American in its obsessions (because it surely is) by a marginal actor in that nation’s recurrent drama? Let me see if I can answer that.
One of the main characters – Robert F. Kennedy Jr – is currently in charge of health policy in the US, and may be known to at least some Australians.
The other – Olivia Nuzzi, who wrote the book – may well have them scratching their heads.
The backstory goes like this: Nuzzi, who is in her early 30s, at first falls in love with an early-50s journalist, Ryan Lizza (he used to work for the New Yorker). She is working at the time for New York (a different magazine) which commissions her to write about RFK Jr. She ends up falling in “emotional love” with him. He is in his early 70s.
According to Lizza, she “explained to me that she became ‘infatuated’ with (Kennedy Jr) after their interview, that she couldn’t get him out of her head, and that as her obsession intensified, she sent him increasingly risque pictures and texts.”
The matter ended badly for Nuzzi, who was sacked when her bosses at New York found out about the liaison. Nuzzi now wants to use her connection to Kennedy to reflect on the nature of American politics. Robert Kennedy Jr is never named in her book – for legal reasons, we assume. Instead “the Politician” is the focus of Nuzzi’s wandering disquisition. But this politician, refracted through his adoring, sometime companion, has very little to say about anything.
All the while the President drifts in and out: “I cannot tell you the first time I heard about Donald Trump because he was always there” perhaps to show what great access to powerful men Nuzzi enjoys. There is not much about all these men we do not already know, cannot have guessed, and hardly thrill to see enumerated here.
Nuzzi has an annoying reliance on non-sequiturs: “In 1996, the year that Donald Trump acquired the Miss Universe Pageant, I turned three, and JonBenet Ramsey, who was six, was murdered”.
Her take on powerful men, a central concern across the book, is straight out of a campus course on sexual harassment: “Like all men but more so,” she says of Kennedy, “he was a hunter”. Yeah, right.
At university, young women are less likely than ever to encounter any kind of men. On American campuses, female undergraduates outnumber males 60:40; liberal arts degrees are 70:30 (at some Australian universities this is closer to 80:20). Do these leftish women now rely on a caricature to explain the behaviour of men they don’t encounter?
Kennedy becomes a proxy for men generally. This is a problem for men, and certainly for this book. Kennedy’s idiosyncrasies and conspiracism – from vaccines to diets – are legion, but they are also enervating. We have known President Trump has a fetish for oddballs. So what? Ronald Reagan took Biblical prophecy as a guide to public policy and listened to his astrology-loving wife.
Nuzzi never gets to grips with the philosophical or historical implications of the current administration. The book has no comparative framework, across history or geography. Instead, on RFK Jr, we get: “Others thought he was a madman; he was not quite mad the way they thought, but I loved the private ways that he was mad. I loved that he was insatiable in all ways, as if he would swallow up the whole world just to know it better if he could.”
We’ve known the Kennedy men are oversexed for nearly 100 years. They were all at it. From the patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy, father of Jack, Bobby, and Teddy, on down to RFK Jr, each had sexual appetites which were matched and facilitated by their political ambitions.
Power was a means to women. Attractive women, too. Bill Clinton was surely oversexed but went “downtown” for his liaisons. The Kennedys liked “uptown” girls viz Olivia Nuzzi – though the three-times married Robert Kennedy Jr denies having any sexual relations with that woman.
Do we know this Kennedy better by this book? Do we need to? I’ve a limited fascination for his health, or even his worm – “I loved his brain”, Nuzzi tells us, “I hated the idea of an intruder therein”.
It’s a sentence which makes sense only if you know that RFK Jr insists that a parasitic pork tapeworm once entered his brain and ate part of it. Nuzzi did not deepen my fascination with him, or his health policy. Transcriptions of her few interviews with Donald Trump appear (from 2017 to 2024, she was the Washington correspondent for New York magazine). Their back and forth on the 1991 movie The Silence of Lambs – he loves it, she doesn’t – aren’t quite the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Future scholars may find them important for that very reason. I found them dull.
Has it become cliche yet for any book reviewer to claim, “this could have been written by ChatGPT”? If it is, sorry, because this book reads like AI has taken a few minutes to process this instruction:
“Write me a 300-plus-page self-regarding memoir of my frequent but not deep liaisons with powerful men, referencing nothing outside of America or the minutia of its beltway politics, in the style of a boring New York magazine writer (like there is another kind?). Oh, and make it a book about love even though, I, the author, have a highly flexible notion of its obligations.”
Some of the greatest writers on American politics happen to be women: Peggy Noonan, Maureen Dowd, Gail Collins, Lionel Shriver, Ann Coulter (yes, even her). Nuzzi fails to join their ranks. The book makes Kamala Harris’s execrable, ghostwritten memoir read like Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
A bad book about something that should really matter to us – the character of American power and its current personnel – is still a bad book.
I love America. For what it has done. For what it still stands for, under and after all the noise and nonsense. It is the working out of the human condition. It has a politics which assumes men are not angels.
But not that they are evil. The American idea is capacious enough that both Olivia Nuzzi and Alexander Hamilton form part of its expression.
The powerful yet clownish men, whose pursuit and psychoanalysis frame Nuzzi’s narrative, the hoopla and triviality of so much pretending to profundity, the straining for relevance and fame in a system that offers them only fleetingly: this, and less, is what the book is about.
A canto, I should point out, because she never addresses the rationale for the book’s title, is one of the sections into which certain long poems are divided; Dante’s Divine Comedy, for example, has 100 cantos, Lord Byron’s Don Juan 17. Both are better than Nuzzi on power and sex.
American Panto might have been a better title.
Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.
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