The Self-Delusions of Olivia Nuzzi’s American Canto

I knew about beauty pageants because of JonBenét Ramsey, and I was frightened by beauty pageants because of JonBenét Ramsey, because she was the first girl through whom I learned that if you are beautiful you may get killed, and once you are killed you will become the property of the country, and the country will resurrect you so that you can be killed again and again in ecstatic detail on the national altar of television; JonBenét Ramsey said that if you are beautiful you may get killed in service to your country.

If you haven’t caught it, she’s drawing a parallel between herself and her troubles as a beautiful person and Ramsey, and she gives herself permission to draw the connection because of a kind of numerology. “In 1996, the year that Donald Trump acquired the Miss Universe Pageant, I turned three, and JonBenét Ramsey, who was six, was murdered.” Three years later, when she was six, she saw Donald Trump’s car in traffic.

Didion’s techniques have a purpose. Nearly all of her writing had as its target sloppy thinking, self-deception, delusion. Her prose style was the scalpel she used to cleave the real from the unreal. The repetition, the specificity, the remove from her subjects, created a sense of absolute, dispassionate precision. When she’s writing about herself, this precision leavens the anxiety she feels and provides a useful tension. When she’s free to observe other people she’s not emotionally invested in—say, Michael Dukakis or Newt Gingrich—her prose, and her thinking and analysis, is as clear as a mountain spring.

In American Canto, these techniques are exactly the wrong choice—they spotlight what is actually occurring on the page, which is imprecise prose reflecting unclear thinking. This is true from the jump. In the brief introduction, Nuzzi writes that this is not “a book about the president or even about politics.” A few pages later, though, she writes that what “happened between me and the Politician,” which is to say RFK Jr., is in fact the same thing that “happened between the country and the president. I cannot talk about one without the other.”