Uneven novel of ideas examines figures in flux
The Dissident
By Nell Freudenberger
Ecco, 427 pp., $25.95
At a time when cultural authenticity has again become a flash point of literary discussion -- ``How dare a writer exploit a culture not her own," sticklers protest -- Nell Freudenberger has the moxie to follow her prize-winning story collection, ``Lucky Girls," which featured privileged, unhappy Americans living in Asia, with an ambitious first novel, ``The Dissident," about a Chinese performance artist on a yearlong fellowship in Los Angeles.
Freudenberger was born in New York, reared in Los Angeles, educated at Harvard, and then spent a few years teaching and travel ing in Asia before returning to New York City. Like Arthur Phillips, another hyper-talented Harvard graduate whose expatriate experiences spawned his first novel, ``Prague," those few years abroad apparently changed Freudenberger's perspective on America. They certainly gave her a different angle from which to tackle several big social issues: broken homes, first and often inconvenient love, and American cultural imperialism and xenophobia.
In her stories, Freudenberger's expatriates, like E. M. Forster's Englishwomen in India and Italy , barely adjust their dress or behavior to accommodate their new environments. The Harvard-educated Bombay SAT coach in her story ``The Tutor" reflects, `` Americans could go all over the world and still be Americans; they could live just the way they did at home and nobody wondered who they were, or why they were doing things the way they did."
In ``The Dissident," Freudenberger turns the tables to consider a foreigner in America, and Americans from a visiting foreigner's perspective. Her book is about people in transition, hesitating between two worlds -- like the figures in the ancient Chinese scroll that features prominently in her novel. Freudenberger's characters are caught not just between cultures but between the past and future.
She also expands her inquiry to include broader questions about identity and authenticity in people, cultures, and art. Although uneven, ``The Dissident" is an impressive novel of ideas. Freudenberger's prose is richer in concepts than in the moving passages that characterized her stories, but it is lucid, unpretentious, and often witty. Ironically, the chapters with the greatest cultural authenticity -- about the dissident's dysfunctional Los Angeles host family and its Hollywood social milieu -- are the least satisfying.
It is when Freudenberger writes from the viewpoint of Chinese artist Yuan Zhao, the reluctant dissident who visits the United States on a cultural mission, that her novel is most compelling. Zhao tells the story of his involvement in the Beijing East Village experimental art movement that grew on the site of an industrial dump in the early 1990 s and how it led to his difficult year in Los Angeles in 2000.
Unfortunately, Zhao's story is interwoven with an involved and distracting third-person satirical portrait of his American hosts. The Travers family travesty reads like a would-be drawing -room comedy. Gordon Travers, a psychiatrist famous for his study of manias and obsessions, is so obsessed with his family genealogy that he seems not to notice that his affection-starved wife, Cece, has had an affair with his wayward younger brother, an aspiring playwright. Even the news that his teenage son exchanged his stereo for a gun, perhaps harboring suicidal intentions, has failed to fully capture Gordon's attention. Gordon's sister is a prying novelist always scavenging for material ``like a ragpicker." Rounding out the family is his French-spouting teenage daughter, who attends St. Anselm's School for Girls, where Cece volunteers and Zhao is a visiting teacher .
Zhao, in contrast to the hollow Traverses, is a wonderfully realized character. ``I have always been impressionable, skilled at mimicry. I am, as my teacher admitted, a brilliant copyist," he confesses on the first page -- alerting the reader to expect a book about counterfeiting, which it turns out to be, although in unexpected ways.
In recognition of his creative limitations, Zhao decides to study English instead of art. But art remains his passion, expressed in his relationships with other artists. These include his former girlfriend, a fashion designer whom he misses terribly ; his cousin, a subversively inventive, twice-arrested, famous performance artist whom he calls X ; and a talented and intriguing Chinese-American student at St. Anselm's. It is X who encourages him to act in his stead as an ambassador for international art in Los Angeles, despite earlier compunctions about keeping Chinese art in China.
A perpetual outsider, Zhao questions what he sees on both continents. He notes Americans' disproportionate fascination with the dark side of China's history, their tendency to believe what they read in newspapers, and their strange custom of dressing tony private school ``adolescent girls in outmoded children's clothing."
More important, in the process of vividly describing Beijing East Village's often outlandish projects, such as ``Drip-Drop," in which Zhao and his cousin crouched sweating over a Ping-Pong table for hours, Freudenberger poses searching questions about art.
Must art be creative and new? If a photograph is all that survives from a performance called ``Something That Is Not Art," is it art? If so, who deserves credit (and remuneration) -- the performer who created the piece or the photographer who captured it on film? Is a con a form of art? ``Perhaps art is not the thing itself, but the perception of art," Zhao muses.
One thing is certain: Freudenberger is the real thing. ``The Dissident," although flawed, is -- in the words of the art historian who shrewdly lauds Zhao's American project -- her ``cleverest performance to date."
Heller McAlpin reviews books regularly for a variety of newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, and Newsday. 
