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.

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.

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.