The Dissident by Nell Freudenberger

The dissident of the title is Yuan Zhao, a young Chinese artist who is due to spend a year as a visiting artist at LA's prestigious St Anslem's School for Girls. He will be staying with the Travers family, wealthy patrons of the school and, of course, deeply messed up beneath their comfortable middle-class veneer. Gordon Travers is a tenured academic who doesn't have sex with his wife Cece anymore (she's been having an affair with his "loser" brother Phil for years). Their children are the precocious Olivia and the depressed Max. There is also "Auntarctica", Gordon and Phil's sister Joan, a novelist who seems rather keen to take other people's lives and turn them into fiction. Joan disapproves of the various pets in the Travers household; these include a rabbit called Freud and a cat called Ptolemy. But Cece, who has turned the pool house into a studio in anticipation of the dissident's arrival, "had always had a problem saying no to foundlings... When Cece thought of the dissident, alone in America for the first time, she felt a kind of anxiety that could only be alleviated by doing something. It wasn't generosity so much as a kind of habit." The dissident duly turns up, looks at Cece's breasts occasionally and is generally misunderstood by everyone.

The novel, which has just been longlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize, is mostly narrated in an overindulgent third-person voice, where all the characters' motivations and feelings are neatly labelled with adjectives and abstract nouns. This voice is interspersed with a first-person narration from the dissident himself, who tells a well-paced, non-linear account of his past in China, and his present in America. Both these narrations are problematic. The third-person voice tells of a family whose conflicts and dramas (Max is found with a gun; Olivia gets in with the popular crowd at school; Gordon seems ambivalent about the fact that his wife is sleeping with his brother), while compelling, are rendered with all the emotional depth and range of an episode of The OC.

The first-person voice is far more ambitious (Yuan Zhao is a complex and unreliable narrator), but is utterly inauthentic. I am as interested as the next person in a young, edgy, Chinese artist's view of the world. What I am not interested in is a young American woman's idea of what this man would think and do. That's not to say that she hasn't done her research: clearly she has. But a passage describing Yuan Zhao's trip to get his visa becomes merely a summary of what someone has learned about what this process might involve, not an account of a real character in action.

Elsewhere, Freudenberger is able to capture something more authentic, and her writing can be very good (one character sees himself as the "flaming, orbital debris" to another's meteoric rise). But more often it is weak and imprecise. The most convincing sections of the novel are those featuring the novelist Joan, and it's a shame that Freudenberger didn't think that this voice would be interesting enough to sustain the whole novel. First novelists can perhaps be forgiven for wanting to take on the god-like "challenge" of creating diverse multiple narrators and perspectives. But given the fact that these challenges usually entertain only the writer, the reader can probably also be forgiven for not really giving a damn.

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