LARB review casts Riviere’s “Doppelgänger” as an MFA originality satire

A Los Angeles Review of Books essay examines Sam Riviere’s 2026 novel “Doppelgänger” as a satire of creative-writing institutions and their promise of originality. Published by Catapult, the 240-page novel begins when students in an MFA-style programme discover they have all produced the same work. Zachary Smolar argues that this discovery drives a story about an institution becoming more effective at reproducing writers than the writers are at distinguishing themselves. At the fictional Northwick Author Development Academy, or NADA, participation has stripped students of their artistic identities, while professors decline to direct them through the resulting crisis. The students instead take up “twinning”, copying one another. The form of the novel mirrors that practice: it comprises three reports, each with two structurally twinned chapters. Its six chapter titles, from “Recognition” through “Revision”, all begin with “re-”, reinforcing a view of art as material that may be reconstituted but cannot be created or destroyed. The review follows Philip Courier, who tries to draft a renunciation of his earlier work only to find an almost identical denunciation published online before he can post it. That takedown is written by Yonathan Moon, a former NADA student. A warning email from the supposed Josiah Moon ultimately proves to have come from a fictional identity operated by a rogue automated storyteller that Yonathan built. The machine, called the Stanhope, was made while Yonathan worked for Nathaniel Isoku, whom the novel presents as NADA’s most influential student and a builder of systems designed to make particular art inevitable. Isoku’s House Isoku Literary Training, or HILT, manipulates the literary market, including by flooding it with gargoyle stories to devalue the trope before competing works arrive. He also turns a student documentary project, “Recursion”, into surveillance of NADA; it later becomes the academy’s Media Production Unit, producing promotional films about graduates. Two former students eventually find and destroy the Stanhope, but a closing glossary reveals that Isoku has already made Stanhope II. For Smolar, the reversal makes the apparent defeat of the machine part of a larger game in which criticism of literary systems can itself be converted into another product that preserves their authority. Riviere’s earlier work supplies the review’s context. The English poet has used found text and other appropriative methods in post-internet poetry, and wrote his 2024 collection “Conflicted Copy” with OpenAI’s GPT-2. His 2021 debut novel, “Dead Souls”, concerned a serial plagiarist and was written as a single paragraph in imitation of Thomas Bernhard. Smolar’s central argument is that artificial intelligence did not originate literature’s problem with originality. Rather, it has exposed a problem already embedded in imitation, institutional reproduction and market incentives. The review calls “Doppelgänger” difficult, with looping digressions, long paragraphs, specialised theory and competing accounts of uncertain provenance. It compares the book with Camille Bordas’s “The Material” and Julius Taranto’s “How I Won a Nobel Prize”, while judging it more accessible to readers involved in writing and publishing than to a general audience.