Doppelganger – Naomi Klein

I picked up Doppelganger thinking, if nothing else, it might be a timely read for the Italian porn star @Albo. His Twitter handle is frequently unintentionally tagged in tweets about Australian politics, as he shares a nickname with our Prime Minister and, given it’s an election year and our Albo took home a resounding win, his notifications must have been flooded with #AusPol scuttlebutt for months. Naomi Klein can definitely relate.

Naomi Klein is a Canadian author, activist, and filmmaker, best known for her works of left-leaning political analysis and climate activism. Naomi Wolf is an American author who rose to prominence in the ’90s, around the same time as Klein. She hit the scene with center-left third-wave feminist views, but over the years she has descended into the world of conspiracy theories and far-right fear mongering. It’s hard to imagine that they could be confused standing side-by-side, but on the internet where attention to detail is scant and miscommunication is rampant, it happens a lot.

In Doppelganger, Klein describes her experience of being “chronically confused” with the woman she refers to as the “Other Naomi”. She briefly explains the origins of their mistaken identities, and how they became “not just confused, but conflated”. Then, she explores Wolf’s “mirror world”, the far right where vaccines are dangerous and Belfast was safe and peaceful in the 1970s. She finds herself caught between the proverbial rock and hard place: anything she says online about Wolf to distinguish herself from the Other Naomi only serves to juice the algorithms and accounts that confuse them.

“That’s the trouble with doppelgangers,” she says on page 27. “Anything you might do to dispel the confusion just draws attention to it, and runs the risk of further cementing the unwanted association in people’s minds.”

I might have known better what I was in for with Doppelganger had I read any of Klein’s previous work (most notably, The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, to which she refers frequently). I was really hoping for an introspective memoir, an account of what it feels like to have such a notorious doppelganger and how it impacts one’s day-to-day life. While Klein addresses this somewhat in the early chapters, and alludes to it throughout, it’s not really the focus of Doppelganger.

In fact, I struggle to pinpoint the book’s focus at all. It’s not a biography of Naomi Wolf, and it’s not a critical overview of her work and politics (though naturally they are examined in detail when it serves to make Klein’s point). It’s not Klein’s memoir, either (though her personal experience of being mistaken for the Other Naomi was the impetus for writing Doppelganger to begin with). The Other Naomi is something like a vehicle for Klein to write about what obsessed, angered, upset, and confused her during the hazy days of the pandemic period, which makes for a somewhat confused polemic about nearly everything.

Climate change, disability rights, racial justice, the Palestinian genocide, capitalism – something that Wolf has said or done sends Klein off on huge tangents, interrogating the (sometimes loose) associations that the concept of a doppelganger has with any given subject. There are some ideas she mentions only in passing (e.g., the internal policing of language and identity in leftist politics), and of course, those are the ones I wish she’d really drilled down upon.

I was relieved to stumble upon the Irish Independent review of Doppelganger and realise that I wasn’t alone in my thoughts. The review praises the personal insights that Klein offers, but also says that “the scope is so wide-ranging that, at times, the reader can wonder how everything is linked”. That articulates exactly how I felt while reading it. In fact, I found that review, and another one from the Guardian, provided more clarity on Klein’s ideas than the book itself.

And, over and above the content, I’m confused as to who Klein’s intended audience is for Doppelganger. Is it just white middle-class women who (statistically) already share a lot of Klein’s views? If so, it seems like a lot of work to preach to the choir. If not, I feel like other audiences (Palestinians and the Palestinian diaspora are two that come to mind) would find her ‘revelations’ patronising at best, so again, it’s a wasted effort.

I appreciate Doppelganger as a work of meticulously researched non-fiction, with a fascinating source of inspiration… I just wish it had been a different book. There’s a super-interesting story to tell there, but Klein chose to take it in another direction. Her book, her rules.

Read Doppelganger on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Doppelganger:

• “Aside from delusions of grandeur and shocking self importance, I am unsure of what Klein’s point is. She’s a ‘Karen’ about being confused with another Naomi with whom she recently began to disagree.” – AmazonCustomer310
• “What a worthless assemblage of drivel. Poorly written and any shred of a theme staggers more than a nap deprived toddler stumbling toward a meltdown.” – sarah w
• “Didn’t know Naomi Klein was so delusional as to appoint herself as the arbiter of reality. No thanks” – Michael