Feels like falling down a rabbit hole, albeit a dazzling and erudite one.

...a compelling and far-reaching political detective story.

This story of mistaken identity would on its own be gripping and revealing enough, both as a psychological study and for its explorations of the double in art and history, the disorienting effects of social media, and the queasy feeling of looking into a distorted mirror. But the larger subject of Doppelganger turns out to be a far more complex and consequential confusion: Its guiding question is how so many people have in recent years broken with conventional left-right political affiliations and a shared understanding of reality.

Klein’s real interest, as you might expect from her previous work, tends more toward sociology than psychology. Her doppelgänger isn’t an opportunist or a con artist, Klein decides, but a genuine believer.

Doppelganger is an evolution for Klein, in terms of its style and content. Whereas her other books knitted together on-the-ground reporting with analysis and polemic, this new work takes an altogether more personal approach. She uses the metaphor of the doppelganger as a way to explore our post-truth political moment.

The scope is so wide-ranging that at times the reader can wonder how everything is linked, but Klein always keeps a grip of the common threads even as she sways off the path a little.

You may well wonder how such a faintly comical theme can be extended for 350 pages, and what it has to do with Klein’s usual preoccupations of combating corporate capitalism and climate crisis. It is certainly the most introspective and whimsical of Klein’s books to date, but it is also one of surprising insights, unexpected connections and great subtlety. The Klein/Wolf confusion is an entry point to consider wider forms of disorientation that afflict the left.

Klein’s instinct is not only to condemn. She makes the important case that the very nature of polarity now means that crucial journalistic questions go unanswered.

Often fascinating and, like much of Klein’s previous writing, not without neat coinages and pithy, memorable formulae.

The book is most engaging when Klein is essayistic rather than didactic. She deftly weaves in cultural representations of the double—from Dostoevsky and Graham Greene to Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock and Jordan Peele’s film Us—to frame her thinking. The peek down the rabbit hole is elucidating, saving the rest of us from 'a master’s degree’s worth of hours' immersed in 'extremely prolific and editing-averse' podcasts. Klein (or her on-page doppelgänger) is companionable and self-deprecating. Reading Doppelganger is like being seated next to someone really interesting at a dinner party . . . but that doesn’t stop the reader from beginning to check their watch before dessert.

There is a remarkable level of compassion and respect that Klein shows her mirror-figure in this book. She does not deal the low blows that would have been easy to land (and the opportunities for which are many), and while she does examine Wolf’s persona, work and life, she is never playing the woman.

This is a brilliant insight, but it’s a column, not a book. With another 200 pages to fill, Klein broadens her thesis. Conspiracy theories, she tells us, are the twisted doppelgänger of investigative journalism. A personal brand is a doppelgänger of the self, as is an online avatar.

By the end, I wondered if maybe Klein had come closer than ever to cracking the code that reveals what, really, is at the heart of our collective dysfunction.

Doppelganger is a weird book. How could it be anything else? It is a deposition filed to prove that the author is not the same person as her subject. It is a horror story that describes how it feels to have your public identity intruded upon, cuckoo-like, by a monstrous rival. It is an attempt to understand the popularity of the conspiracy circus in which Wolf is now a leading performer.

With alternative-fact-fueled rhetoric undermining essential institutions, Klein recognizes that an individual’s vulnerability to malignant outside influences is symptomatic of widespread threats to cultural norms. Her provocative thought exercise illuminates the myriad ways taken-for-granted balances can be upended and calls for heightened awareness of the dangers of identity erosion on both large and small scales..

Klein’s prose is tight and urgent, almost breathless, evoking both laughter and dismay and entrancingly matching the mounting frenzy of seeing your public self morph into someone else—or of watching conspiracy theories take hold, particularly in the destabilizing context of the pandemic. Braiding cultural criticism with a charitable attempt to humanize the 'Other Naomi,' Klein excavates legitimacy beneath sensational fears and exposes the failures of both sides of so many of the world’s binaries.

Klein excels at identifying patterns and calmly and rationally exploring and explaining them. Although the topics she writes about are frightening for those who fear for a future defined by climate disaster, extreme inequality and war, the ways in which she draws connections, backed up with compelling and well-researched and -reasoned evidence, is, in an odd way, reassuring. It provides confirmation that readers who have noticed some of these phenomena are not crazy..

Klein’s writing is perceptive and intriguingly personal, but the doppelgänger theme begins to feel slightly overextended, with too many variations muddling the metaphor. However, by articulating such an expansive view of the uncanny, Klein’s mesmerizing narrative reflects the unique anxieties and modes of analysis that have come to dominate the online era. Like Klein’s previous books, it’s a definitive signpost of the times..