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Young, Hot, and Blessedly Unclever
A Review by Anna Godbersen

Just to get it out of the way, Nell Freudenberger, whose first book was a collection called Lucky Girls, is one of those young authors who get accused of being hot and overpaid (for a writer, that is), which sound suspiciously like sins we'd all like to be guilty of. But unlike many a hot, young, writerly thing, her work is largely devoid of the clevers; such is the evidence, anyway, from her impressive debut novel The Dissident. The title refers to a quasi-famous Chinese experimental artist who has been dropped down into an upper middle class Angeleno family suffering from the usual maladies: professional jealousy, a history of adultery, surly teenagers galore. The dissident is staying with the Travers family of Beverly Hills while he teaches at their daughter's prep school as an artist-in-residence, but he is cagey about his next project and about the persecution he suffered from his government for his political activism and illegal performance art. This allows for some funny outsider looking in at the screwy, tragic nature of the American family stuff -- all is not as it would seem with the Traverses, of course. Nor is all is it would seem with the dissident -- at least, he keeps dropping hints to that effect. There are some big ideas here, many of them interesting, about art and authorship and identity, although The Dissident is more notable for a quiet kind of sophistication. Despite its neat plotting, this novel is unmistakably slow -- no hyperventilating for Freudenberger, no messy clamoring for multiple literary references -- and it does the unglamorous work of chipping the hard shells off its movingly drawn characters. The Dissident is not the kind of book that knocks a reader down, but it does have the power to linger.

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