Doppelganger, by Naomi Klein

“It’s all so unbearable. No wonder we work so hard to look away. No wonder we erect those walls, literal and psychological. No  wonder we would rather gaze at our reflections, or get lost in our avatars, than confront our shadows.” (p. 323)

This is a compelling, sometimes difficult read and I’ve had to stop and start a few times to process some of what it says. Naomi Klein, the author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, keeps being mistaken for the conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf, and becomes obsessed with trying to understand her double, the journey she has taken in the past few years and what it can all mean. In the process, she grapples with Covid, the history of anti-Semitism, the situation in Gaza and a whole load besides.

I’m haunted by the radio interview with Wolf, which I heard go out live on the evening of 21 May 2019. Presenter Matthew Sweet (my mate!) asked her to explain the thesis of her new book, Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalisation of Love, and then, at 21:20, said words to chill the blood of any writer.

“I don’t think you’re right about this.”

What follows is polite, curt and utterly devastating. When Matthew then turns to the next item in the programme, and another guest, you can hear their nervousness. You can still hear the whole programme, if you dare.

Klein charts how Wolf got there and what happened next, but really this is a book about how we respond to extremism of one kind and another without becoming extremists ourselves. That entails some self-examination and scrutiny of the structures we so often take for granted — Klein has a lot to say about capitalism as a whole.

Much of this will linger with me. I was especially taken with what she says about the response from John Berger to her previous book, The Shock Doctrine, where he said shock can make us lose our identity and footing. Berger concluded that, “Hence calm is a form of resistance.”

“I think about those words often. Calm is not a replacement for righteous rage or fury at injustice, both of which are powerful drivers for necessary change. But calm is the precondition for focus, for the capacity to prioritize. If shock included a loss of identity, then calm is the condition under which we return to ourselves. Berger helped me to see that the search for calm is why I write: to tame the chaos in my surroundings, in my own mind, and—I hope—in the minds of my readers as well. The information [of the sort she reports on] is always distressing and, to many, shocking—but in my view, the goal should never be to put readers into a state of shock. It should be to pull them out of it.” (p. 227)

At the end, we’re told Klein invited Wolf to respond, to have a conversation, but never got an answer. One question Klein wanted to ask was whether Wolf might remember her from the one time they met, when Klein was still a student and Wolf was promoting The Beauty Myth. Klein admits she was dazzled by Wolf, was probably influenced by her as she started as a writer — in effect, she might be the doppelgänger, not the other way round.

But there’s another devastating sentence, on p. 345, when Klein repeats the first thing Wolf ever said to her. I felt that, in just those few words, it unlocked so much about her.