spread mockery Wolf received for this theoriz- ing was “not [Klein’s] fault.” Indeed, Wolf’s self-inflicted humiliations predate Doppelga- nger and continue apace. But, with this book, Klein unquestionably draws further attention to Wolf. This is ostensibly about holding Wolf accountable, but does it risk backfiring? D oppelganger is well-executed and at times quite engaging, with a focus on the urgent rather than the symbolic and superficial. It shows that the author is deeply learned, plugged into high culture and low, and grounded in reality. As a non-fiction book using doppelgangers as a lens for examining our times, the book succeeds. Where I’m less persuaded—if more enter- tained—is the Naomi Wolf bit. The focus on another writer named Naomi doesn’t quite land. The idea that Wolf is Klein’s doppelganger is clever at first but starts to seem forced as the book goes on. It’s not that I don’t believe people misspeak and name one in lieu of the other. (Reader, I have thus misspoken.) But this is something readily corrected, and it does not appear to have impeded either one’s ability to go about her life, each being extremely her own Naomi. They get confused all the time, it gets rectified, and life moves on. These things happen. I’m not sure exactly where in Doppelganger it hit me that I was too sympathetic to the wrong Naomi. Maybe it was where Klein eye- rolls at Wolf for referring to herself as a “tech CEO” when Wolf had, at the time, merely a “low-traffic website.” Klein had just gotten through reminding readers that her 1999 book, No Logo , sold over a million copies.” Or maybe it’s not even about sympathizing with Wolf, but about finding the conceit itself questionable. Yes, both Naomis are public figures, and I’m sure gatekeepers aplenty OK’d this on legal grounds, but the use of this other person, an actual person, to make a book-length point about the shakiness of identity, seems a bit much. From a storytelling perspective, Klein doubtless made the right call. But I won- der if a version of the book that was less person-specific would have made the points more effectively. I should be thinking about how terrifying it is—and it is!—that propagand- ists made the pandemic worse than it had to be, and what this implies for future crises. Instead, I’m wasting time wondering, But how does Naomi Wolf feel about there being this smash hit new book about how ridiculous she’s become? My reaction to Doppelganger took me by
Naomi Klein at Whytecliff Park in Vancouver, July 2023.
Doppelganger is also, incidentally, an im- portant Canadian-Jewish book—worth noting, as these do not appear every day—with passages about everything from Montreal Hebrew day school to Canada’s response to the Holocaust. Some of the best parts are when Klein examines the Jewish angle of the Naomi-Naomi confusion. Do the people mistaking one Naomi for another think all Jews look alike? (Klein’s mother considers this a possibility, and she herself doesn’t rule it out.) It’s impossible, though, to write about Doppelganger without returning, as Klein her- self does, to Naomi Wolf. The book mentions Trotsky, Sartre, and Freud, but the figure who looms largest in it by far is Wolf. Wolf, Klein says, “is a kind of a through- line... She’s both an entry point, like the
white rabbit, but she’s also a case study of a particular type of person who changed quite dramatically during the pandemic years.” Klein recounts to me, as she does in the book, how Wolf joined forces with the political right, and in doing so, rather publicly abandoned principles in areas like reproduct- ive rights and gun control. “I followed her be- cause she just kept giving me new material.” And the material does keep coming. Klein reminds me of Wolf’s then-latest viral (as it were) pronouncement, a truly out-there conspiracy theory about vaccine shedding. “If you’re going to say that people are getting menstrual cramps for sleeping in the same hotel room with people who are vaccinated,” says Klein, “you’re going to get a pile-on on Twitter.” Klein is right about this, and that the wide-
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