The Dissident, by Nell Freudenberger

"This will be a story about counterfeiting and also about the one thing you cannot counterfeit," Yuan Zhao informs us in the opening pages of Nell Freudenberger's debut novel. The famous Chinese dissident and performance artist arrives in Los Angeles to take up a residency at St Anselm's, an academy for the spoilt daughters of professionals. Yuan is lodged with the Traverses in the stucco grandeur of their Beverly Hills home. Gordon Travers is a psychiatrist obsessed with his family tree, Olivia a student at St. Anselm's, and younger brother Max a disturbed adolescent who spends his time evading his fretful mother.

Kindly Cece is Yuan's good angel. Tender and conciliatory, she sustains her troubled marriage while brooding regretfully over a past affair with Gordon's brother, the feckless Phil. His sister Joan, a novelist, observes the family with a cold eye.

The year is 2000. A decade earlier, teenaged Yuan was invited by his older cousin to join a notorious, if transitory artistic community called the Beijing East Village. The impoverished group, renowned for its performances and activism, attracted journalists, foreign academics and the notice of the authorities, who imprisoned the subversives.

Yet Yuan doesn't quite match his heroic reputation. Soon after he is installed in Cece's pool house, Phil arrives unannounced. He has sold a screenplay and brought Cece a present, a bush-baby named Fionulla, to grace her extensive garden. The story alternates between Yuan's history of the East Village, Travers family tensions and his growing uneasiness. He must also suppress his attraction to a promising student, June Wang, whose inspired anarchy seems to embody East Village spirit. But he's accused by another student of inappropriate behaviour.

Unable to work on his own paintings, he begins making an exact copy of a 14th-century scroll. Clearly, Yuan is not what he seems and may even be a piece of someone else's performance art. But whose? Fionulla, meanwhile, is missing.

Freudenberger's writing is appealingly fluid and open, with a striking consistency of tone. Her book's glossy veneer and smoothly engineered construction put me in mind of a luxury automobile. She raises interesting questions about creation, authenticity and "this business of pretending". But her answers, though emotionally reassuring, are intellectually unsatisfying. The rebellion of the artists turns out to have been simply a point on their career curves, and they have since prospered in the capitalism embraced by new China. But high prices were paid by students and campaigners after Tiananmen, and the novel risks trivialising important issues and real sacrifices.

Freudenberger's affection for her characters is contagious, and we are encouraged to smile indulgently at shortcomings. The satire flatters its audience, and I can't help thinking of the more astringent sociology that Zadie Smith would have applied to this comedy of manners. There is no anger in The Dissident; even political persecution is merely regrettable.

All is gentle irony and good taste. As a result, the novel often seems bloodless, its own facility steering it sweetly towards the vanilla. The truth of Yuan's identity is uncovered, naturally, by the novelist. As the finale dissolves in a happy haze, the runaway bush-baby is restored to her landscaped cage. Security is best.

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