The Northwick Author Development Academy (NADA) is where the best and the brightest emerging writers and creators go to hone their skills and springboard into careers of literary fame and influence.

Having the bright, young and innovative, if impressionable, people together results from time to time in cultural trends originating from the hallways and learning spaces at NADA: a lemon coffee trend, a silver vow trend, and others. But it is the twinning trend that makes both the biggest impact and threatens to destabilize NADA, as well as the other elite academies it is related to and in competition with. 

The twinning trend is where readers dive into Sam Riviere’s latest novel, DOPPELGÄNGER, an exploration of creativity and creative assimilation, social dynamics and hidden power in contemporary culture.

"DOPPELGÄNGER is a strange, dense and challenging read as it explores originality with original form and narrative. Riviere’s sentences are long and detailed, yet the novel moves quickly from start to finish."

Carl Sample, a NADA sophomore, and the rest of his NADA cohorts realized that much of their work sounds the same. Were their ideas really indistinguishable from each other? Was their work really less unique and singular than any of them thought it to be? The faculty also noticed it, and Carl had been thinking about it all summer. When, in a common room back on campus, Carl regales his friends with his plan to provoke someone in town into punching him in the face --- due to his fear of being punched in the face --- his peers slowly realize that they are witnessing the reveal of a creative work in progress, the birth of a new project. But before the group can leave on the mission to get Carl punched, a student named Jericha Winter rushes into the room. She had been punched in much the same manner that Carl had planned. So the trend of twinning begins. 

While it seems like a new way to express identity, twinning at NADA is really a shift that begins to expose how the students at Northwick have been manipulated (and in turn become manipulators) and the ways in which meaning is made, unmade and remade across cultural currents. 

From the story of Carl and Jericha, Riviere moves from one set of related characters to another, each individual and each couple in pursuit of sense, signification, connection and consequence. There is an underground (literal and figurative) group of watchers, recording the lives of NADA students in case someone becomes famous; they will have documentary footage at the ready. There are a pair of elderly Irish poets whose own relationship seems to foretell later pairings. And there is Josiah Moon, an AI author built by NADA graduate and author Yonathan Moon. Much of the action seems to be controlled by the machinations of another NADA grad, Nathaniel Isoku, who now runs House Isoku Literary Training as part of his creative empire. His expansive vision of control over creative output is part of what results in the eventual lack of creativity felt by the sophomore cohort. 

But by the end of the novel, things get even more complex and convoluted as the machine known as Josiah Moon must be destroyed. 

DOPPELGÄNGER is a strange, dense and challenging read as it explores originality with original form and narrative. Riviere’s sentences are long and detailed, yet the novel moves quickly from start to finish. Patient readers will be rewarded with a timely, imaginative and sometimes funny, but often sadly serious, examination of the ways in which AI and other means of mass uncreative production cause harm and disruption.