The Dissident
by Nell Freudenberger
Picador ₤14.99, 427 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤11.99
In the running, if increasingly irrelevant, battle over whether women write books as important as those penned by men, Leo Tolstoy often comes up. Show us a female novelist with Tolstoy’s ambitions and successes, say the doubters - one who has aimed at the big questions of war and peace, not the small ones about marriage, family and creature comforts.
It is telling, then, that by page 62 of Nell Freudenberger’s debut novel, The Dissident, Tolstoy gets a quiet mention. One character - a woman writer, in fact - notices in the jumble on her desk an overdue library copy of Family Happiness and Other Stories, the Russian master’s collection of tales about love, marriage, art and patriotism.
These, too, are The Dissident’s themes, and the book’s substance and style succeed in debunking - as Tolstoy surely would have - the notion that epic ideas cannot be got at through such quotidian subjects as family happiness. The family in question are the Travers - a professor of psychiatry, his wife and their two children, living an upper-middle-class existence in contemporary Los Angeles. They are most interesting, again in accordance with Tolstoy, in their unhappiness. Not only do they hit the familiar tropes (Gordon and Cece Travers haven’t had sex in years and their son has been found in possession of a handgun), but Cece seems to be sleeping with her brother-in-law - a cultural taboo strong enough to make her a modern-day Anna Karenina.
Into this pot is plunged a Chinese artist who has come to the US to promote his work. He is also to live in the Travers’ home, and teach at their daughter’s school. Yuan Zhao comes from a community of avant-garde artists who lived and worked in Beijing’s East Village in the early 1990s, catching up on the artistic revolutions they had missed while their country was closed to the west. Yuan says he was persecuted by the government after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, and again five years later because of his provocative art.
Journalists, economists and political historians have spilled enough ink recently to convince citizens of the west that China is worth examining. Rarer are the western novelists who tackle life there - and Freudenberger explores this territory with confidence. Her descriptions of the East Village scene, which really existed in Beijing, are knowing and engaging.
Freudenberger writes as convincingly from Yuan Zhao’s perspective as Cece’s. But her depiction of these two main characters is not entirely satisfying. Their motivations are too often mysterious, and even physical descriptions are at times vague. The dissident’s unfathomable character is an important part of the plot; Cece’s less so. Yet Freudenberger may have done this on purpose: in one chapter, Cece’s sister-in-law (the Tolstoy-reading novelist) wonders if her brother knows about Cece’s infidelity, and concludes that he “...both knew and didn’t know: that was why real life was both more complicated and less satisfying than fiction”.
Freudenberger is willing to be more complicated and less satisfying than her readers might hope - a strategy that worked well in her collection of short stories, Lucky Girls. But in a novel, unexamined motives and truncated character descriptions can leave you wanting more.
Still, much of her writing is dizzyingly, delightfully specific. Here she describes a reunion after teenager Olivia’s school trip abroad: “’At school, some people think we’re bitches,’ her daughter explained, over lunch at a restaurant in Brentwood Hills the day after she’d returned from Paris. (’Bitches’ surprised Cece, but she concealed it.)” Mother-daughter dynamics dissected over lunch? It’s as girly as it gets. But in a book called The Dissident, all mentions of loyalty - even a mother’s strained loyalty to her exasperating daughter - hint at larger, Tolstoyian even, themes.
