The Dissident

by Nell Freudenberger

From the PEN/Malamud Award-winning author of Lucky Girls comes a bold, intricately woven first novel about an enigmatic stranger who disrupts the life of one American family.

Yuan Zhao, a celebrated Chinese performance artist and political dissident, has accepted a one year's artist's residency in Los Angeles. He is to be a Visiting Scholar at the St. Anselm's School for Girls, teaching advanced art, and hosted by one of the school's most devoted families: the wealthy if dysfunctional Traverses. But when their guest arrives, the Traverses are preoccupied with their own problems. Cece—devoted mother and contemporary art enthusiast—worries about the recent arrest of her son, Max. Unable to communicate with her husband, Gordon, a psychiatrist distracted by his passion for genealogical research, she turns to Gordon's wayward brother, Phil. Meanwhile, seventeen-year-old Olivia Travers is just relieved that her classmates seem to be ignoring the weird Chinese art teacher living in her pool house—at least until a brilliant but troublesome new student appears in his class.

The dissident, for his part, is delighted to be left alone. His relationship to the 1989 Democracy Movement and his past in a Beijing underground artists' community together give him reason for not wanting to be scrutinized too carefully. The trouble starts when he and his American hosts begin to see one another with clearer eyes.

A novel about secrets, love, and the shining chaos of everyday American life, The Dissident is a remarkable and surprising group portrait, done with a light, sure hand. Reviewing Lucky Girls, the Seattle Times praised Freudenberger's "merciless and often hilarious eye for family dynamics, and her equally sharp eye for cultures in collision." These talents and others are on full display here, as the author captures her characters in their struggles with art, with identity—and with one another. As the New York Times Book Review observed, "Young writers as ambitious—and as good—as Nell Freudenberger give us a reason for hope."

Genres: Fiction, China, Literary Fiction, Novels, Asia, The United States Of America, Contemporary

448 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Nell Freudenberger is the author of the novel The Dissident and the story collection Lucky Girls, winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; both books were New York Times Book Review Notables. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library, she was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40.” She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Reviews

[Eveline Chao · Rating 1 out of 5]

This wasn't bad for a first novel, but, eh. Basically none of the characters ever really came to life or drew you in so that you ever felt invested in or particularly attached to any of them.

I think the author was maybe a bit too ambitious with the number of characters. All of them were given a cursory psychology and background and personality but once given the explanation that, say, the middle sister always felt like a gray sheep against her white sheep & black sheep brothers, nothing really happens with her and she just kind of drops out of the story.

Also it seemed like the book couldn't decide whether it wanted to be this big literary revelatory dramatic thing or lighthearted and slightly comedic. If it was trying to be the former, then the various dramatic revelations that we spent chapters and chapters of plodding narrative and not terribly interesting flashbacks building up to were totally anticlimactic. Like you spend forever being given all these hints that the main character is haunted by some memory about his ex, and once you finally learn what the big painful memory is (after WAY too many pages), it just doesn't feel like that big of a deal. Same with the present-tense storyline - there's all this foreshadowing that something is going to go awry at the school where the protagonist teaches, and once it happens, you're sort of like, "That's it? That's not a big deal at ALL!" Basically with a book of this size, and with this much foreshadowing and hinting all along the way, I expect some earth-shattering shit and instead you get some ho-hum pedestrian shit.

I actually think the book could have been pretty good if it had committed in the other direction to being sort of wryly comedic, which it almost did in the chapter where Phil smuggles a bush baby onto an airplane, instead of trying to cover so many different perspectives and worlds all at once.

Or alternately, the author actually had a lot to say about art, which came up all through the book and which I felt was actually pretty interesting, but which kept getting dragged down/wiped out by the plodding storylines. So as long as we're tossing out Alternates for What the Book Could Have Been, I think the author had it in her to pull off a full-on highbrow exploration of What is Art? but then felt like she had to make it more commercial and mass-markety and threw in all these lame storylines (who cares about the annoying black sheep brother whom we don't actually ever learn anything about?) and all this dramatic revelation stuff that didn't really work.

[Edy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fabulous book for many reasons. The Chinese artists coming out of the Cultural Revolution have been producing some of the most complex, disturbing, and evocative artwork today. The author uses this as her backdrop to discuss the meaning of art, as well as the purpose of art in our modern world of utility and extreme praticality. The writer's direct, unadorned narrative was accessible, yet profound in its simplicity and frequent hints of a dry, dry wit.

On the nature of artist:

"It's a paradox, I guess," Joan continued. "Of course it's better for artists to live in a free society, but I wonder if political pressure can sometimes be good for art?" (112)

"Someone once told me that's the sign of a real artist-- they don't care about their work after it's finished... We can be excited about the work, whether it's ten years old or two hundred.. but for the artist it's always about the next thing."

"X waved that away. 'An artist is an artist, no matter what he's doing.'
I didn't believe that. In fact, I believed the opposite: an artist is someone who's making art, and I had not not done anything more than pencil sketches for the past five years" (p 37). [I'm with the second viewpoint.]



And then randoms that I identified with:

"After Meiling and I split up, I sometimes wondered whether the secretive tendency I'd developed as a child was the thing that attracted her to me; if you are a hider, you have to be careful of seekers, who are drawn to you simply for the challenge of discovering something. But of course, hiders are drawn to seekers too; there is always some part of us that yearns to be found out." (page 119)


"It helps to have a talent for making oneself agreeable to strangers, something that has always come easily to me. I see what people want, and I give it to them. Maybe that's a bad quality; in any case, it isn't one my cousin ever shared." (page 38)

[Michael Lindgren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nell Freudenberger’s career to date reads like a novel in itself, with her Harvard education, slinky good looks, New Yorker publication, famous literary agent, and mentions in Vogue and Elle. It is a letdown, of sorts, to find that her debut novel is such a banal affair. The Dissident tells the story of Yuan Zhao, an exiled Chinese artist who comes to live with the Traverses, a Southern Californian family that is a Woody Allen-style parody of shallow Beverly Hills life. The dramatis personae include an absent-minded writer father, a sexually unsatisfied homemaker mother, two surly teens, and a Chinese-American student who— surprise!—is authentically talented. Hijinks ensue, secrets are revealed, lessons are learned, etc.

This is, to put it mildly, well-trodden territory. To be fair, Freudenberger is a crisp stylist, and she effortlessly captures the tics and mannerisms of these feckless Californians, as observed by the bemused Yuan in his role as cultural ambassador. Freudenberger’s observational powers and way with a phrase only go so far, however, and as pleasant and absorbing as it is, The Dissident imparts no impact: it practically evaporates upon completion.

From THE BROOKLYN RAIL, November 2007

[Cora · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nell Freudenberger's The Newlyweds, about a Bangladeshi woman who moves to upstate New York as a mail order, was a pleasant surprise for me last year. Freudenberger seemed as comfortable writing about Dhaka as she did about Rochester, and the novel nicely married the adjustment that any immigrant makes coming to a new country with the more intimate and emotional compromises necessarily for a serious relationship. (She also eschewed cliches about fiction set in Muslim countries, which I was grateful for.) So naturally I was interested in reading her first novel, The Dissident, which tells the story about a Chinese dissident who moves to southern California for a long-term fellowship. Unfortunately, I felt as if it was much less assured than her second novel.

For example, I felt as if Freudenberger's voice wasn't entirely there. The Newlyweds was in large part a comedy of manners (in America as well as Bangladesh), but at times The Dissident edges toward outright parody in its presentation of the various American characters, which is not a voice that suits the novel well. Even when the novel isn't being arch, many of the characters are too easily reduced to familiar types: the cold fish husband, the middle-aged immature fuck up, the brittle novelist (which felt like self-parody), the sullen teenagers, etc. I was more interested in the sections of the novel set in Beijing's East Village, among the fragile community of radical Chinese artists, where everything didn't seem quite so familiar.

Partially, too, I was disappointed that Freudenberger wasn't as interested in the clash of cultures this time around, and instead left the dissident and his host family in parallel stories for much of the novel. She skillfully teases out her primary concerns, about authenticity and authorship as it relates to art, and I could see her drawing some interesting parallels. But it all felt a little too inside baseball to me, like something a novelist would naturally care about more than I do.

Having said that, there were plenty of flashes of the author that I knew as well. I thought at first that Freudenberger was taking a page from Jonathan Franzen in her portrait of a wealthy American family, but she's too fundamentally even-handed for that and even said cold fish husband is given a moment to be honest and sympathetic while maintaining the integrity of the character. And Freudenberger can be sharp about the differences between the two cultures, even if that theme isn't explored nearly as well as in The Newlyweds. (Dissident artist Yuan Zhao was trained by a traditional landscape painter to replicate traditional forms instinctively before moving on to more original work. When he fails to get this across to his American art students, he explodes, "You are not trying to express yourself. You are trying to express a lobster.") I basically liked the book--I don't finish books that I'm not enjoying on some level--but I would recommend starting with her second novel instead.

[M · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this 4 stars worth, but the book itself really doesn't deserve more than three.

The Dissident is a tale of deception and quiet desperation as two worlds collide - that of a Chinese man posing as a famous artist in residence in LA, and the family he stays with - the Travers - who are unfolding as their son struggles with depression, their daughter flirts with anorexia, the husband shuts the door on his feelings and the wife falls for his brother.

What I liked: the writing is clean and engaging. I enjoyed the day to day, the petty dramas, the relatable if not very likeable characters.
However, the story was woefully incomplete - many threads went nowhere and there was a sense of blah to the overall execution. I didn't fully follow or enjoy the chinese man's story, and my interest in the LA people's was mostly because I really like following people's dramas.
This was definitely a decent read and it helped the afternoon pass but nothing earth shattering here.

[Jason Pettus · Rating 1 out of 5]

(The much longer full review can be found at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

(Today's review is chock-full of spoilers, for reasons that will become obvious; those who are planning on reading the book themselves would be well-advised to skip this essay altogether until after finishing the novel. For a quick idea of what I thought of the book, please see the first two spoiler-free paragraphs.)

With the 2008 Beijing Olympics just around the corner, there's never been a better time to revisit the subject of Communist China, and especially of the ways that artists are treated under such a system. After all, as with many other subjects, China and the US have dealt with young subversive artists in very different ways over the decades, with quite different results as well: the Communists, for example, for the most part tend to jail and/or kill such artists, making their power to persuade simply grow that much more; while those in charge in America over the decades have tended to co-opt these artists instead, using their cutting-edge messages to sell more hamburgers, and paying these artists obscene amounts of money in order to keep their mouths shut over the entire thing.

So you would think, then, that a book bringing these two worlds clashing together, like short-story veteran Nell Freudenberger does in her first novel The Dissident, would be a delicious affair indeed, a story that would have a lot to say about how difficult it is to pull off truly challenging artistic projects in a consumerist society; and in fact, Freudenberger's novel starts with some truly great characters finding themselves in some truly compelling situations, an environment where all kinds of fascinating conclusions could be drawn under the right hands. Ah, but then Freudenberger unfortunately pisses the entire thing away, taking some of these premises and doing nothing with them, taking others and concentrating on the absolutely least interesting thing about them. It is an infinitely disappointing book, it's my sad duty to report, a much bigger travesty than a novel that's simply bad; because in this case the book is actually good at first, something that could've ranked with the best of Jonathan Franzen if it had been handled right, but by the end achieves the kind of ponderous monotony of a typical 19-year-old's writing exercise in an English 114 class, something that will have most intelligent people scratching their heads and saying, "Seriously, you don't have anything better to say about such a fascinating subject than that?"

The Dissident basically tells two stories...

[Susan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book. It begins with promise, but deflates thereafter. In order to believe in this book, the reader must overlook the author's calculated deception that a character is who the author says he is up until the last few pages of the book when he is revealed to be someone else. It's a little more complicated than that, but that's the essential flaw. Anyone who comments on this book without a "spoiler alert" is confronted by the dilemma of discussing the book without discussing the flaw. Discussing the flaw "spoils" the (contrived) plot and reveals a broken contract between the author and the reader. I've tried to be circumspect here, and I don't think I've revealed anything that would unravel the confusion at the heart of this book. (The author sets it up as a story about "counterfeiting" and "about the one thing that you cannot counterfeit".) The reader doesn't realize the broken contract until the final chapter. The author's deception and deliberate confusion aren't the only problems, but they warrant a 2-star rating. The time these pages require is not rewarded. One last point. Much is made (in the book and in these reader comments) about the question of performance art and ownership. Does the performer own the art or is the art produced by the photographer who documented the performance? This question is posed as if the Chinese discovered it in the East Village of Beijing in the 1990s. It is, however, a question that was exhaustively debated by western performance artists of the 1970s -- a fact that The Dissident never acknowledges.

[G · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's ironic that I'm putting this under "no complaints", because I have a lot of criticisms of this book which are fascinating when one thinks about what Freudenberger was attempting with the book. There are a lot of plots at work - a Chinese dissident artist who comes to LA on a fellowship, full of deceit; his host family's slow implosion; the treacherous social strata of the school where the dissident is teaching - and despite Freudenberger's best intentions, the book doesn't come together. But why? What has she been attempting to analyze (most notably the lines between art/everything else, conventional truth and deception, and the constructed self versus the socially constructed self))? And how does she parallel, and fail to parallel, the characters in the novel? Her writing is fluid and she clearly has a great talent, especially for set piece scenes (this is a book with 80 chapters), but this novel is a collapsed souffle: a tasty failure.

[Whitney · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well-written. There were moments of honesty and truth I appreciated.

That being said, I don't recommend it to anyone and would probably sell the book. (I never part with books.) Did anyone else notice that some parts of the story you were supposed to be emotionally invested in just ended? Absolutely zero resolution--as in never got mentioned again. I also felt like 'Who in the World cares about the actual Story'?! The decent writing hides the fact that there is no story worth telling. However, a couple of days after putting down the book (once the writing has worn off)you become really irritated. Like you had been reading with the wool pulled over your eyes and the fog was clearing. Not much recommends it after the fog clears.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

nell freudenberger can write. reading her books is so easy on the mind because there's no craziness you have to struggle through in the language.

when i finished it was hard to believe that the protagonist would pull such a risky stunt. i guess he was still unformed as a person and also wanted an escape.

slightly problematic elements: 1) another book about the top 1% of the socioeconomic ladder, 2) a far-fetched scenario, and 3) the neatly tied cinderella ending.

i forgive the problematic things because of Cece's mother's love and Lobster Hermit's insecurity. both of these emotions rang true and made me give a damn about the book.

[Nora Rawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was shocked by how much I loved this. Reminded me of Franzen, but much warmer and kinder. I appreciated the romanticism of this--the reunion of our dissident and his student, and to me, the hope that Cece will end up with Phil when she leaves her husband. Read it between LA trips and when I finally settled in, it went down a treat, almost in one sitting. Wonderful asides throughout and probably because I'm older, I love that the book mainly is less interested by its younger characters. Yes, it doesn't come entirely together, but life is a bit like that too, wider and less complete than fiction.

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Dissident was a EXTREMELY good book in my opinion. I had a personal connection because everyone reminded me of people i knew. The story was set in L.A and a famous chinese artist was coming to stay with a typical american family. The story revolves around the meaning of family and how one person can come in and change everything. There are ways to show teenage to parent bonds, husband to wife, and stranger to disaster. I would recommend this book to anyone and everyone because you can find some sort of connection in every page

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

5 stars for the writing, three for totally dropping the ball in the last 40 pages or so... I would definitely read more of her stuff, but hope she learns to tie up a plot more satisfyingly.

[Kira Vine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel tackled several interesting themes - the ownership of art, what makes art *art*, identity, culture clash - but it never quite coalesced into a convincing story. Freudenberger writes characters extremely well, and deftly cuts to the heart of interpersonal dynamics, but this book could have been twice as long and still not filled in all of the gaps that were left open from storyline to storyline. That said, I appreciated the impetus to question my own thoughts about art, artists, and identity as the various characters tried to figure their own lives out, and I did enjoy the read.

~~~

"To them, English wasn't really a language. It was a genetic gift, present in everyone but unfortunately latent in some people, like biceps. It only had to be strengthened and drawn out."

"...I sometimes wondered whether the secretive tendency I'd developed as a child was the thing that had attracted her to me; if you are a hider, you have to be careful of seekers, who are drawn to you simply for the challenge of discovering something. But of course, hiders are drawn to seekers too; there is always some part of us that yearns to be found out."

"But I have never been sure that we are all talking about the same thing when we talk about love. Perhaps real love is too boring to talk about. Heartbreak is so much easier to understand that I think we might sometimes employ it as an understudy, a stand-in for the real thing."

[Rhyena · Rating 4 out of 5]

She is a very interesting author who observes cultures in great detail and shapes characters that reflect that culture as she did in the Newlyweds and this novel. She drew such interesting characters each with their own personal quandary or crisis and shows the way their interaction with each other caused conflict and change and ultimately resolution. I loved the ending - so like life- so understated, so limp, so real, a verifiable facsimile of life, which was the point of the dissident's struggle.

[Frank Strausser · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here’s a fine LA genre novel of recent vintage. Nell Freudenburger’s THE DISSIDENT introduces a new wrinkle: a mysterious Chinese dissident takes up residence with a dysfunctional LA family. Cultural identity and culture clash are so much a part of LA. I’m fascinated with LA genre novels and have written my own, PLASTIC. I’m also quite interested in Chinese contemporary art having visited 798 in Beijing years ago and she’s done her research. An interesting story!

[Angie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Freudenberger is becoming one of my favourite authors. This is her first novel, after her book of short stories, and it is impressive for a debut novel. The story centres around a Chinese artist who has come to Los Angeles on an artist in residence program. There is a mystery around his origins. There are actually a lot of characters and themes in this story but they all gel in a very satisfying way.

[Claire Schiopota · Rating 2 out of 5]

I never got into it because I never formed attachments to any of the characters. There were so many and none of them feel completed? She started all these plots and only completed half of them. Mind you, the big reveal was just like, oh, okay, sure, cool. The book was well researched and all, but if the story doesn’t match, what’s the point? I understand why I bought this at a thrift store for $2 now.

[Bonnie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came to "The Dissident" with high hopes, because I loved Freudenberger's "Lost and Wanted." I don't think this earlier book is anywhere near as good. It's about a Chinese artist who comes on a scholarship to southern California, the family he stays with, and the high school students he teaches. As in "Lost and Wanted," there's a mystery within, but it's not as compelling.

[Stacie Saurer · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a good story and kept my attention, but this book has not aged well in 14 years. I assume the point was that everyone's a dissident in their own special way. Or perhaps it was trying to be more Henry James-ish in analyzing the effect of foreigners and Americans on each other. In any case, there was just too much going on with too many characters so that it came across as superficial.

[Siobhan Harrop-McDiarmid · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nell is wonderfully talented and here she explores a "dissident" from Beijing's East Village and his impact on a wealthy family and girl's private school outside of Los Angeles. Her authentic characters come alive in all their vulnerabilities and wisdom.

[Vivienne Strauss · Rating 4 out of 5]

I basically read this in a 24 hour span, couldn't put it down.

[Secret List of Books]

Another really good book.

[Gretchen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Couldn't finish it. Confirmed my strong prejudice against domestic novels that include strong academia elements. That obviously, makes me NOT the target audience of this book.

[Judy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I managed to finish this book, but have to admit that I understood very little of it. the primary characters and their motivations were unclear to me. Lots of unfinished business.

[JC Sevart · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are so many dropped storylines, storylines with too much time (the bushbaby!!), and whole characters I found unnecessary. But to be honest this book's worst sin is that it's kinda boring

[Laurie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Chinese artist. A bushbaby mascaraing as a cat. art made of rotten fish.

[Kristen · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best novels I've read in a while; read it again as soon as I finished.

[Jenny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent writing, appealing characters (especially Cece, for no reason I could put my finger on), an inventive twist, a convincing setting: this is a very good novel by a talented author. The narration swaps back and forth between first person (the eponymous dissident) and third limited (Cece, her sister-in-law Joan, her brother-in-law Phil), which I found slightly jarring at first but fine once I recognized the pattern.

Quotes:

...we didn't want to know the truth about each others' situations. We wanted to imagine that paradise existed just outside the gates of our own lives. (52)

They couldn't stand to fail. Even to succeed wasn't enough, if the success wasn't spectacular. (98)

However, there are various types of lies: an outright attempt to deceive another person is different from a story that feels true, and only needs to be translated into another form to be understood. (114)

...if you are a hider, you have to be careful of seekers, who are drawn to you simply for the challenge of discovering something. But of course, hiders are drawn to seekers too; there is always some part of us that yearns to be found out. (119)

Maybe the compromises were different, but culture shock could only last so long. At some point, you had to stop being shocked and start absorbing it; otherwise, you would all stay strangers forever. (245)

"Maybe in a foreign language we can never say exactly what we mean..." (277)

I was sorry that I hadn't spent my whole life trying to become the kind of person she'd admire. (294)

I imagine that's something celebrities have to contend with all the time: their fans have an unshakable impression of them before they've even met them. Even if the reality doesn't conform to those expectations, a true devotee won't be disappointed by the discrepancies. He simply won't see them. (303)

Relationships were never equivalent: that was why it was so hard to find permanent ones. When two people depended on each other, they each had their own reasons. Sometimes the reasons balanced each other out temporarily, and the two of you were suspended gently in air. (376)

How could you ever know the truth if each successive person translated it into a new vocabulary? (395)

[E. Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though filled with complex, infuriating and sympathetic characters, the star of “The Dissident” is really art—and all the forms that it may take; successful and otherwise.

Each character in Nell Freudenberger’s novel is on his or her own artistic journey; some endeavoring more meaningfully than others but all, nonetheless, supremely real. At the center of “The Dissident” is the dissident himself (sort of)—Yuan Zhao (again, sort of)—a mysterious copy-artist whose unoriginal work begs the questions: what is plagiarism, what does it mean to create art, and who does that art belong to after the artist has completed their creation? There’s Phil, a noncommittal and wayward actor-turned-writer who has sold a barely-fictional screenplay about his own affair with his brother’s wife. Rather than making art from life, Phil has seemingly only reproduced life, with a few thinly-veiled pseudonyms. Joan, Phil’s sister, is a frustrated writer who will extend herself well beyond the boundaries of tactless impropriety in order to coerce a story out of her unsuspecting subjects. Joan’s “art” is manipulative, dishonest, immature and insincere; and as such, ultimately goes unproduced. Tianming is a photographer who has made his name through the pictures he captured of Beijing’s 1980s-era “East Village” performance art—again raising the questions that are essential to this novel: what is art and who owns it?

Certainly the most interesting, and perhaps underrated character in “The Dissident” is June Wang, a teenage girl with undeniable artistic talent and a seemingly-vague attraction to her art teacher, “the dissident”; who ultimately gets expelled from high school for her own piece of performance art inspired by none other than Yuan Zhao; involving an unlikely collaboration of fish, flowers and fireworks.

While all the characters in this novel have complex and often dysfunctional relationships with one another, their individual relationships to art was the element I found most fascinating. “The Dissident” explores the theory, creation and evolution of art in a really interesting way. Nell Freduenberger is an exceptionally talented artist herself.