Regrettably self-serious ... Amid the noise around Nuzzi, American Canto itself drops with a soft, disappointing thud ... Wafting and unfocused in a manner that makes you long for the sweet relief of a detailed policy paper, American Canto offers many scenes...but little sense ... Nuzzi is an astral force I can still see somehow hurtling triumphantly through the transformed media galaxy. But this moon’s a lead balloon.

Amid the tumult of gossip, American Canto arrives as a peculiar artifact. It refuses chronology and coherence, which makes it a challenge to extract answers to any of the many questions a reader loosely aware of her story might have ... Does not tell all. Readers looking for a clearer understanding of her involvement with Kennedy will be disappointed ... It is hard for a reader to know what to make of Nuzzi in this mode. For one thing, her observations of the country veer from banal...to ridiculous ... Disappointingly, she seems to have abandoned the reportorial instincts that were once the basis of her success.

In writing American Canto, while Nuzzi has broken her vow of silence — smashing it into smithereens and setting off a wave of public retribution by Lizza — she has succeeded brilliantly in her wish not to be understood. Nuzzi emerges less as someone who, in the words of her publisher, “walked through hell and she took notes,” but as a woman whose version of the events that laid her low remain stubbornly unprocessed — as blurry and borderless as the book itself ... In real life, Nuzzi may have risked it all, but as an author, she hasn’t been as fearless, using words as armor, not conduit. It’s an understandably protective posture, but not one that has produced a memoir of consequence.

Ethically speaking, Nuzzi’s journalistic breach was grave: She had compromised her reporting by becoming intimately involved with a subject and a source. But as a piece of human drama, her lapse was gripping ... American Canto, Nuzzi’s much-anticipated attempt to write her way out of a reputational pit, is a scramble of fragments ... Incomprehensible ... A public hungry for scandal might be more satisfied if American Canto were uniformly excellent or uniformly terrible. But in our unsatisfying reality, it is what most debut books are: highly uneven and largely forgettable. To be sure, vast swaths of it are impressively and aggressively awful. When Nuzzi is trying to sound literary, as she often is, her syntax is tortured and halting ... It reads like a Joan Didion pastiche — but it is worried and overworked in a way that Didion, a master of taut precision, would never have countenanced ... A book that consisted solely of impressionistic dispatches from 10 years of reporting on Trump would have been good, perhaps even great, but it would also have been less splashy ... You shouldn’t write a memoir unless you are willing to make yourself look foolish and pathetic. Nuzzi breaks this cardinal rule, flattering herself by admitting to only the chicest kinds of disintegration.

I’d say American Canto is a sad and bizarrely told story about a motherless girl who technically did have a mother well into adulthood, and a daddy’s girl whose sanitation worker father did his best but could not protect her from her abusive, alcoholic mother ... Oh, also: This is really a book about Donald Trump ... [A] sad book ... These deeply disturbed people are our journalistic elites, my friends. And you wonder why our democracy is hanging by a thread?

Nuzzi’s attempt to elevate a grubby affair to the status of the mythic, to transmute the base metal of Page Six sexting stories into the gold of literary reflections on the political moment ... But all the surf and smoke and Didionesque stylings in the world cannot disguise the central problem with American Canto: It is not honest ... A better book than the rollout suggested. Yes, the narrative is a mishmash ... Parts of the narrative are largely terrible. Someone else’s sexual obsession is, by default, illegible and perhaps even horrifying to outsiders ... There is no real, believable regret in American Canto ... Written too early, and too quickly.

American Canto was the last real opportunity for Nuzzi to talk about what happened: tangibly, what she did to torpedo her career and personal life. It could have been a pulpy tell-all that explains how she fell in love with the worst Kennedy or a political book opening up her reporter’s notebook to share from a vantage point few people ever reach ... Instead, it is illegible in ways you can’t imagine. Historians will study how bad this book is. English teachers will hold this book aloft at their students to remind them that literally anyone can write a book.

It proves hard to trust this journalist-as-subject retelling her side ... Stilted metaphors about fires, flags and brain worms – paired with impressionistic vignettes about Trump – attempt to elevate the book into a trenchant and clear-eyed portrait of America today. But American Canto isn’t this ... Nowhere in American Canto is there any overt acknowledgement of anguish this scandal has caused or atonement for her error of judgement ... Nuzzi may not be an ageing movie star undone by delusion. But she emerges in her self-portrait much like Norma Desmond, a narcissist whose vain attempts at a comeback – without any attempt at self-examination – are doomed to fail.

Just because you’re good at writing about politics doesn’t mean you should write about yourself ... Her prose vacillates between purple and incoherent, a la the ramblings of an adolescent diary.

Olivia Nuzzi wants you to know that she was reading Dante. If the title of her book, American Canto, was too subtle a clue, she writes that she has spent a great deal of time 'analyzing different translations of The Divine Comedy,' going so far as to hire an Italian tutor so that she could better 'understand the source material.' ... American Canto is a failed attempt to write an autobiography in the key of an epic ... Chapterless and digressive ... Among Dante’s great inventions was constructing a vision of Hell where the punishment borne by sinners reflected something of their sin ... It’s fitting, I suppose, that for attempting to be a poet, Nuzzi is instead consigned to a lifetime of having her name on this book.

There’s real insight to be gleaned about how the former New York magazine journalist allowed herself to be used by a political project working to turn back the clock on scientific progress by decades and result in more dead children, but that’s not why Nuzzi is apologizing, or even writing this book. The greatest failing of American Canto is its inability to look too far outside itself ... Crucially, all this thinking about our messed-up country is only of interest because it has forcefully and publicly intersected with the author’s personal life. In this way, it is perhaps the purest version of a Washington memoir yet, one that pretends to be about America and about politics and our twisted state of play but is really an exercise in the writer gesturing at these things with no appreciation for the real stakes of every policy decision made by this administration for real people ... The author goes to great pains to remind us that, for all its flaws, such as electing an authoritarian with fascist ambitions not once but twice, she loves this country ... There is plentiful red, white, and blue. Mentions of the flag are so numerous that I had to switch pens while underlining them.