Weekend reads: The curious case of Naomi Klein

The famed Canadian writer has followed political polarization to some strange places

Happy Sunday, readers. It’s a frigid morning here in Toronto, and I’m keeping warm at a local coffee shop, armed with a strong cappuccino, my table piled with a stack of enticing titles. So, it’s a perfect moment to talk books with you.

Have any of you read Naomi Klein’s pandemic outing? It’s a hugely compelling book. But not for the reasons that many in the chattering classes thinks it is.

The national bestseller — which sees the famed leftist writer follow her longtime doppelganger Naomi Wolf down a “mirror world” rabbit hole on the right — has been almost universally praised in the legacy press, from Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times to Helen Lewis at The Atlantic.

But, as you’ll see, I have a very different take on it.

In recent months, I’ve started contributing to the Literary Review of Canada, a wonderfully thoughtful publication that gives writers lots of space to think through the big books, and issues, of our time. And, crucially, is not afraid to publish heterodox thought.

I’m happy to share a preview of my essay on Doppelganger today, which you can read in full at the Literary Review of Canada site (there’s no paywall on the first three articles). And if any of you have read the book, please drop a comment below, or email me directly. I’m so curious about your thoughts on this one. — TH

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, Naomi Klein

For Canadians of a certain ilk — Gen X, lefty, raised in counterculture circles, news obsessed — Naomi Klein has long been an icon. A columnist for the Toronto Star in her twenties, Klein shot to stardom in 1999 with her groundbreaking No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, which sold more than a million copies and became a kind of bible for the anti-globalization movement. She has since travelled extensively, publishing in the international press to wide acclaim, and penning what she archly refers to as books on “Big Ideas About Serious Subjects.” Known for interrogating capitalism and challenging corporate power, Klein is so committed to the workers of the world, she has joked in interviews, that she visited Indonesian sweatshops on her honeymoon.

So it was with anticipation that this reviewer, a fortysomething news junkie raised on the Left Coast, picked up Klein’s pandemic outing, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. What would the celebrated journalist make of a once-in-a-century crisis, the response to which — as the former New York Times columnist Joe Nocera and the Vanity Fair contributing editor Bethany McLean argue in their own pandemic book, The Big Fail — was hobbled by the same pitfalls of neo-liberalism that Klein has made a career of chronicling?

It came as a surprise to learn that Klein had not spent the COVID‑19 period reporting on one of the most significant upward transfers of wealth in history. Nor covering the grim conditions experienced by essential workers. Nor investigating the impacts of unprecedented public policy — like extended lockdowns — on the working class. Instead, Klein spent much of the pandemic holed up on the remote and spectacularly scenic Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, home to some of the more expensive real estate in the country, contemplating Naomi Wolf.

It started with a highly idiosyncratic problem: Naomi Klein has been perpetually confused with Naomi Wolf, also a famous public intellectual and author of big-think books. Both women are Jewish, both are brunettes with blond highlights, and both once had filmmaker partners named Avram. (Klein is still married to Avi Lewis; Wolf has a new spouse.)

The Naomi confusion posed less of a problem when Wolf was speaking out in favour of causes that Klein supports, such as feminism and Palestinian rights. But in recent years the author of The Beauty Myth has undergone a transformation. In 2019, the premise of Wolf’s book Outrages, which rested on a misreading of a historical term, was exposed, live on BBC Radio, as false. Shamed and humiliated, she migrated away from the liberal left — where she was once an establishment Democrat, even serving as a consultant to Al Gore — and found a new home on the populist right, as a regular guest on Steve Bannon’s podcast, War Room. Wolf was frequently de‑platformed for posting anti-vaccination content, including, among other things, the claim that the vaccines were “a software platform that can receive uploads.”

The mix-up between Klein and “Other Naomi” thus became an acute branding crisis — and one that deeply frustrated Klein, both because she was against the whole concept of personal brands, as per No Logo, and because her attempts to address the situation on Twitter proved ineffective.

Sometime during the long, disorienting months of pandemic isolation — when her social media use increased — Klein found herself mesmerized by Wolf. Her interest took an obsessive turn, and the research, as she puts it, “began to truly spiral out of my control.” She was soon making herself late for appointments by pulling off on the side of the road to listen to Wolf’s podcast appearances in her car; she streamed War Room episodes while practising yoga. Her husband was exasperated. (“I’ll block Twitter,” she promised him.) Her mother expressed concern. Several in her circle “strongly cautioned” against writing Doppelganger. But she ultimately felt compelled to.

The question, of course, is: How do you take such an experience and make it a book?

To continue reading this review, visit The Literary Review of Canada (no paywall on the first three articles).