Book Description
A hilarious, scathing, and absurdist critique of contemporary culture set in a fictional university town in the near future where a contagious “twinning” trend has swept across the student body
At Northwick Author Development Academy, an elite incubator for the creative class, originality is both fetish and mandate. Its candidates arrive ravenous for distinction—only to discover, after a year of carefully engineered “disorientation,” that their work has converged into something eerily uniform.
When a student in the sophomore cohort, Carl Sample, announces his intention to provoke a stranger into punching him—an act pitched as both personal exorcism and artistic experiment—the action seems grotesque, comic, and vaguely prophetic. Before Carl can enact his plan, another student is assaulted in town. This emerging crisis of coincidence binds the cohort in a tightening web of surveillance and mythmaking, as intention and event fall fatally out of sync. Watched constantly by the Academy’s hidden media unit, the students begin to resemble copies of one another—twinned in fear, ambition, and aesthetic drift.
Doppelgänger is fiction at its most clever, most engaging, and most self-reflective. The reader embarks on a quest with an uncertain outcome, and Riviere keeps us on our toes throughout with his wit, his stylistic brilliance, and his matchless mind. Is this a scathing critique of contemporary culture or a virtuoso game of cat and mouse? Who’s to say? A bit of both, probably.
Praise For This Book
Our Culture, A Most Anticipated Book of FallThe Millions, A Most Anticipated Fall Book
Literary Hub, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year
"A canny, cerebral work of hyperrealism . . . Beyond Riviere’s genius dismantling of capital C 'Culture.' there are also more general observations about society that you feel compelled to underline . . . He layers observation on observation, pairing the recursive rhythms of Thomas Bernhard with the social acuity of Ben Lerner. Often his paragraphs run to several pages but avoid disorientating the reader. Meanwhile, his winking character names—Patrick Fake, Isabella Final, Carl Sample—are enjoyably Pynchonesque. The danger with writing a book like Doppelgänger is that you end up perpetuating the very thing you’re warning against. But Riviere pulls it off; he has succeeded in making Doppelgänger undeniably singular." —Matthew Janney, The Financial Times
"That tension between the absurd and the true is at the center of Doppelgänger, a novel about the impossibility of originality in literature when the systems built to support it become better at reproducing writers than writers are at distinguishing themselves . . . For those seeking a truly rollicking academic satire, Doppelgänger is a courageous experiment that rewards its readers, and it is more adventurous than other academic satires of late."—Zachary Smolar, Los Angeles Review of Books
"I loved Riviere’s debut novel Dead Souls and have become a tremendous fan of his poetry since. All of that alone makes this an auto-read for me, but this would’ve caught my eye anyway: a near-future campus novel about art students finding themselves doubling one another, intentionally or not, sounds like a tricksy delight." —Drew Broussard, Literary Hub
"What holds this enormous amount of whimsy and information together is the gloriously individual and specific imagination of author Riviere . . . An inventive and challenging fable offering a dark, entirely human, alternative to AI’s destructive capabilities." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
