I am a little younger than Naomi Klein. Close enough, that like her, I read Naomi Wolf's Beauty Myth when it came out, and, like her, found it more stating-the-obvious than revelatory, on the other hand, felt like something else entirely, the beginning of a new world Gen Xs would form, which rejected commodification of everything. And looked really cool - best No Logo Logo ever.
So there was a strong pleasure in discovering that Klein has aged into a wry sense of humour, a severely decreased sense of hubris, and a seasoned analytical brain that can make a little sense of this moment we find ourselves in.
The focus on this book is, in its own way, a sensibly small issue. The infuriating reality that Klein and Wolf are constantly confused, and, now that Wolf has become a anti-vaxxing, pro-Trump intimate of Steve Bannon, this is starting to be more than irksome.
But in resigning herself to this entanglement, Klein sets off on a journey into how we got to this strange moment, with the rise openly contested truths. Klein starts the book with a highly engaging dive into accepting that she does, in fact, "have a brand problem" with the Wolf confusion, and what accepting that means to someone who built their career on boldly declaring that no person is a brand. This leads into a sense of how the world has played out not in the way we hoped (including her noting that getting a global top designer to do her book cover before the book was written may have been a sign that she wasn't as clear on all this as she thought she was).
This disarming self-assessment carries us through COVID, as she frankly admits that, despite believing that due to the analysis that underpinned her second book Shock Doctrine, she figured she was immune from the distorted judgement that follows a crisis, she plunged headlong into a Wold/antiVax/far right obsession. There is a particularly funny scene when her husband finds her doing her evening yoga wind-down listening the Bannon's podcast. I suspect they are also evident in the way Klein dualities - of various kinds - everywhere.
But these early meanderings, while amusing, also set up the slow build to a stronger analysis and thesis in the second half on the book as Klein tries to understand politically why people confuse her with Wolf and how Wolf - like so many Americans - flipped into conspiracy territory so quickly. A chapter on anti-Semitism, Palestine and Israel - all jumped off from the possible role anti-semitism has in confusing the Naomis - is one of the best things I've read on the topic of being Jewish in this moment.
She delves into Wolf's political trajectory, and looks at how white women, especially those in caring roles, often broke in the pandemic years, noting that Klein's belief in political established power set her up for disillusionment.
Klein raises, without needing to be resolved, the way that identity has becomed tangled with brand for many younger people, and the realities of being encouraged to mine or perform trauma in order to get into college. Her focus on the need to organise, to manage human solidarity in the face of commodification, remains, even as the articulation is different.
I don't quite know what many of her fans will think of this book. It feels like a product of the pandemic, a messy, personal, slightly-on-the-TMI-edge book, a product of not being able to get entirely out of your own head. But it is a joy to read, and very thought provoking. At one point Klein describes the book she intended to write in a long paragraph too boring to quote in full "planned to draw more heavily on Freud’s theory of the uncanny, as it relates to doubles and the repressed id. I would contrast it with Carl Jung’s theories of synchronicity and the shadow self. I would apply these notions of the repressed unconscious to works about doubles by Poe, Saramago, and Dostoyevsky, and to Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities.". This may be scattier, but it is, I think, a much more useful and definately more fun, book.