The Dissident: A Novel - Hardcover

Freudenberger, Nell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060758716 ISBN 13: 9780060758714

Publisher: Ecco, 2006

Synopsis

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."

About this title

About the Author

Nell Freudenberger is the author of the novels Lost and Wanted, The Newlyweds and The Dissident, and of the story collection Lucky Girls, which won the PEN/Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Named one of The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” in 2010, she is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

From the Back Cover

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."

Reviews

Freudenberger fulfills the promise of her 2003 collection of short stories, Lucky Girls, in her expansive first novel. Yuan Zhao, a Chinese performance artist entangled in the subversive community of the Beijing East Village (an artist enclave located in Beijing's "industrial dump"), moves to Los Angeles for an exhibition of his work and to teach studio art to gifted students at the St. Anselm's School for Girls. Upon arrival at the Traverses', his host family, Zhao finds himself in a domestic minefield: Cece Travers, the family matriarch, is having an affair with her brother-in-law, Phil. Meanwhile, her children fumble through adolescence, and her husband, psychiatrist Gordon, phones in his familial obligations. Freudenberger juxtaposes Zhao's early artist days in the East and his unrequited love for the woman he left behind with his solitary life in Los Angeles, where he grows obsessed with a Chinese art student. Under a blanket of cultural misunderstandings and xenophobia, Freudenberger tackles big questions about art: what makes an artist; how artists and writers borrow from each other; and how they appropriate details from the lives of their friends and families. Freudenberger sometimes missteps into humdrum Hollywood satire and uninspired relationship drama, but Zhao is distinctly fresh; it's when describing his journey that Freudenberger's novel takes flight. (Sept.)
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his beguiling first novel centers on a Chinese performance artist and former political prisoner, who travels to Los Angeles to accept a teaching fellowship at a prestigious girls' school. His hosts are a well-off family whose matriarch, Cece Travers, is trapped in a loveless marriage with Gordon, a psychiatrist obsessed with tracing his genealogy back to "the crossing ancestor." A large cast of secondary characters includes Gordon's sister Joan, an accomplished but discontented novelist who stays skinny "by worrying," and his charming but irresponsible brother Phil, who is single-mindedly in love with Cece. Freudenberger demonstrates great talent for capturing the subtleties of cross-cultural and intergenerational relationships, as the dissident's struggles with his past and with his art intersect with Cece's unravelling.
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Freudenberger's first novel (after short story collection Lucky Girls, 2003) is ambitious, crossing cultures and dealing with art and politics, love and betrayal, and--ultimately--deception. Title character Yuan Zhao, known in his native China for political activism and performance as well as graphic art, takes a residency to teach at a girls' high school while living with the Travers of Beverly Hills--psychiatrist Gordon and his wife, Cece, a volunteer at her daughter's school, and teenagers Olivia and Max. Yuan's first-person account, with background of his life and the Chinese artists' rebellion, is interspersed with narrative about the Travers family: Cece's longtime affair with Gordon's brother Phil, Olivia's possible eating disorder, Max's discontent and suicidal tendencies, Phil's womanizing and commitment problems, and Gordon's sister Joan viewing life as grist for her novels. Yuan's involvement with talented student June Wang signals trouble, but there are confusing indicators before a major revelation. Still, although the climax is less than satisfying, getting there is generally a pleasure, given Freudenberger's facile, insightful prose and strong characterizations. Major promotion is likely to generate demand. Michele Leber
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Dissident

A NovelBy Nell Freudenberger

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2006 Nell Freudenberger
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0060758716

Chapter One

I was not meant to be a dissident. I was not supposed to live outside of China. I never intended to be a guest, for an entire year, in the home of strangers, dependent on their charity and kindness. Who would have imagined, watching me grow up in Harbin—sitting quietly with my father in our old apartment behind the Russian church, or clutching my mother's hand as she haggled good-naturedly with Old Yang over the price of scallions—that I would wind up in Los Angeles, living in the guest room of people who could not find the province of Heilongjiang on a simple English map?

I am tempted to say it was an accident. Certainly I would not have gotten involved in politics, or in the artistic community of the Beijing East Village, had it not been for my cousin, also an artist&8212I will call him X. (Because of his continuing activity in China, I am forced to conceal his identity here.) But it also began with my mother, who always hoped I would become a famous artist and go abroad, and with my father, who sent me to have drawing lessons with his old friend, the painter Wang Laoshi. Quite possibly it began with Wang Laoshi, who saw my early efforts, and encouraged me to pursue absolutely any other profession.

But I hesitate to put responsibility on others. In the end it's my fault that I am so easily persuaded. I have always been impressionable, skilled at mimicry. I am, as my teacher admitted, a brilliant copyist. On paper, I could reproduce Audubon's and Bada Shanren's birds; I could make my mother laugh by imitating the gestures and mannerisms of people we knew (for example, my father's postprandial expression of despair); even the pronunciation of foreign words was not difficult for me. In school, English was my best subject, not only because of this talent for imitation but because of my mother, who had been born in Seattle, Washington, and much later became a teacher of Business English at the Harbin University of Science and Technology.

My mother went to China for the first time in 1953, three days after her twelfth birthday, when her parents decided to return to their motherland and do their part for the glorious new People's Republic. My grandfather, an electrical engineer with the Boeing company, had been deeply honored by a personal invitation from Zhou Enlai. As it turned out, however, my grandfather's timing wasn't good. A little more than a decade later, my grandmother and my mother were sent to separate "cadres' schools" to be reeducated, while my grandfather eventually went to a much harsher place—a work camp in the Great Northern Wilderness—where he died, six years before I was born.

When I told this story—as if it had happened to distant relatives rather than to my immediate family—my American hosts were horrified. I think they were also a little thrilled by the tragic irony: it was as if, Cece Travers said, my relatives had been American Jews, returning unknowingly to Germany in 1939. I couldn't explain to the Traverses that a Chinese person did not think of the 1960s and '70s in this way: that those years represented a perversion of our own ideals, some of which we still cherished, rather than an atrocity visited on us from outside. The fact that my relatives had been in a work camp was enough for Cece. "Perhaps they aren't telling you everything," she said, in a way that made it clear she thought I was being callous about the sufferings I described.

In fact the opposite was true. I had my reasons for concealing my background from the Traverses, but I have never been comfortable telling the story of things that happened before I was born. I always feel that I'm making things up. In Los Angeles, I found out how much easier it was to tell my own history as if it belonged to someone else: at the end of my account, I was surprised (and a little proud) to find tears in the eyes of my American audience.

After the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 (and incidentally my birth, in 1975) my mother became an English teacher, if a reluctant one. Her former passion for literature, in particular the Romantic poets, was not relevant to the business English courses she was assigned, and she never returned to the original poems and translations she'd begun as a university student in the early 1960s. Her talents as a teacher were thus primarily focused on me, so that by the time I was in high school, I already spoke English more fluently than my classmates and even my teachers. My mother and I used to laugh at the book I used in school, Idiomatic English, which purported to teach us how to speak like real Americans. The book was full of dialogues between John, Mary, and (inexplicably) someone named "Batty," of which the following is an approximate but unexaggerated example:

John: I am thinking to get a gift for our friend Batty. Monday is her birthday. A necklace or a bracelet would truly fit the bill.

Mary: No one knocks on the gift horse's mouth. But you had better not have a chat with Batty before the big day. That is to say, you are a chatterbox. You will certainly let the cat out of the bag.

John: Mary, you are a strict taskmaster! Why do you say that I am a bean-spiller? I am as silent as the mouse, and also the grave.

Mary: Because right now, John, you are talking my ears off!

When I finally met my cousin X in Beijing, I found him studying from this same textbook, practicing John, Mary, and Batty's lines quite seriously. This was midway through my first year at Beijing Normal, when my cousin still imagined he might go abroad and study. He had come to . . .

Continues...

Excerpted from The Dissidentby Nell Freudenberger Copyright © 2006 by Nell Freudenberger. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060758716
• ISBN 13: 9780060758714
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 448