American Canto

Journalist Nuzzi’s rambling and often surreal debut reflects on a decade of America under Donald Trump as the country and its citizens warp in his image, including Nuzzi herself through her 2024 digital affair with then presidential candidate, now MAGA insider Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “That I have made of myself what others have determined to be Good Copy is a horror,” she writes, then proceeds to reveal uncomfortably intimate details about “The Politician,” as well as trace the public fallout of their professionally unethical relationship. However, her fall from grace is but one component of this nonsensical sequence of vignettes, which includes musings about Genesis (“Adam was a rat”), a court statement about the 2022 assault of Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and references to Trump’s frequent invocation of “the late, great” Hannibal Lector. Buried within these shards lies a withering examination of Trump as a singularly bizarre individual and of “Trumpworld,” with its fanaticism and intra-staff power struggles, as a mirror reflecting America back at itself. Yet, like the “endless scroll” Nuzzi recalls undertaking after watching Charlie Kirk’s assassination, each new vignette brings a chaotic surprise (the author’s memory of the sky on 9/11; a description of a viral video of a raccoon). This incoherent jumble of paranoia, self-pity, and power jockeying does, in its way, well represent the country’s “state of disunion and delirium.” For those willing to buckle up, it’s a wild ride. (Dec.)