Naomi Klein's "Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World" is a difficult book to describe. I'll cut to the chase by saying that it stands alongside Klein's bestsellers "No Logo" and "The Shock Doctrine" as a crucial study of the ways that identity, image, ideology and economics become intertwined in the bewildering conditions of 21st-century consumer capitalism, and is in many ways a subtler and more challenging work than either of those. It's a book that could only have emerged from the pandemic era, but is only indirectly about the multiple crises of politics and public health caused by COVID. More fundamentally, it's an exploration of a cluster of disturbing and poorly understood phenomena that the pandemic revealed or accelerated, but were already there: The division of our politics and culture into incompatible realms of perceived reality, not unlike the mirror universes of "Star Trek," and the merciless commodification of the individual self, which in Klein's reading has undermined community, social movements and the possibility of collective action.
If you've picked up the idea somewhere that Klein has written a book about the experience of being repeatedly confused with someone she sometimes calls "the other Naomi" — meaning Naomi Wolf, onetime feminist crusader and now, bafflingly, an adjunct member of far-right conspiracy culture — that is both true and untrue. It's untrue at the most important level; no one could actually read "Doppelganger" and come away believing that its real subject is Klein's sense of narcissistic injury, or an attempt to defend her personal brand from the damage inflicted by a less desirable Naomi. But it is undeniably where the book starts, and also approximately where it ends: Klein writes with considerable humor and honesty about the contradictions and challenges created by the perceptual blur between her image and Wolf's. They are both outspoken Jewish women and bestselling authors. They are generically similar in appearance, especially when encountered as social media avatars. Over the course of their careers both have been associated, broadly speaking, with left-liberal-progressive politics. (Yes, Klein is familiar with the social media mnemonic used to differentiate them, which she traces back to 2019: "If the Naomi be Klein/ you're doing just fine/ If the Naomi be Wolf/ Oh, buddy. Ooooof.")
