"The whole excerpt is pretty much like this: simultaneously clipped and overcooked in a way that suggests Nuzzi has mistaken having heard a lot about Joan Didion for being able to write like her. I posit that using conjugations of "to say" five times in four sentences is not evidence of style. But this repetition is rendered almost immaterial by what follows:"
"From his mouth the bullet theoretical launched the bullet possible. I did not like to think about it. About the armed man at his speech. Or the armed man who broke into his home. Or the armed men he paid to guard him from armed men who sought to harm him while the federal government denied his pleas for protection from the security agency whose modern protocols were carved by the same bullets that cut boughs from his family tree and cut the track of the American experiment."
Vanity Fair published the first excerpt of Olivia Nuzzi's American Canto, a book Nuzzi said was written largely on her phone while hiking. The excerpt introduces Robert F. Kennedy Jr. without naming him and uses short, overcooked sentences that attempt a Joan Didion–like cadence but often collapse into repetition. The prose repeatedly employs conjugations of "to say" and leans on rhetorical flourish rather than clarity. A striking passage — "From his mouth the bullet theoretical launched the bullet possible" — enumerates armed threats and failed protections. The overall effect reads as style prioritized over coherent meaning.
Read at Defector
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]