>>REVIEW
THE DISSIDENT
Nell Freudenberger
Ecco Press, 247 pp.
There are only two reasons why I continued to read past the first twenty pages of Nell Freudenberger’s The Dissident: I had to, and the dust jacket boasts of the awards Freudenberger has received (such as the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters). After I observed the word "irony" misused on the second page, I was ready to launch the book across the room. I’m glad I didn’t.
This Harvard graduate author of Lucky Girls intertwines the stories of four narrators. First, there is the dissident, Yuan Zhao. He travels to Los Angeles to teach art at a private high school for girls and to exhibit his own art. Zhao, for the duration of his stay in Los Angeles, stays with the family of Cece Travers. Cece, another narrator, is a wealthy but disgruntled mother of two troubled teens, and wife to an impotent (figuratively and literally) husband. Then there is Joan Travers, Cece’s sister-in-law, a successful fiction writer who covertly researches for a novel on Zhao. Lastly, we have Phil Travers, the brother of Joan and brother-in-law of Cece. Our ne’er-do-well brother receives one million dollars from Hollywood for a movie script about his affair with Cece.
The result of these stories are fascinating philosophical questions on art – what it is and what it is not. These questions lead to delicious moments when characters define art, such as the artist who says, "Art isn’t useful. That’s why there hasn’t been any of it for so long." Some consider art as an act of plagiarism. For example, Joan compares other people’s stories to garbage, which she collects after others have tossed them away.
The first part of The Dissident is tedious. Reading Cece’s sections felt like an episode of the O.C. However, Cece’s sections become shorter and occur less often as Zhao’s more intriguing narrative consumes the novel. In addition to this, Freudenberger wonderfully deconstructs contemporary notions of authorship and art. What’s more, her text is simultaneously accessible and thought provoking; I never found myself lost or confused, but I left the book still contemplating the nature of art. |
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