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The Dissident
by Nell Freudenberger
Freudenberger's debut novel follows a Chinese performance artist who moves to Los Angeles to become an art teacher.
Ecco, 448 pages
08/15/2006
$25.95
ISBN: 0060758716
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
The New Yorker
Beguiling.
USA Today Elysa Gardner
But what makes this first novel so impressive, and so richly entertaining and moving, is the range and complexity of its individual characters. Freudenberger draws them with a level of sophistication and compassion that can't be attributed merely to her extensive travel or native precociousness.
Boston Globe Heller McAlpin
An impressive novel of ideas. Freudenberger's prose is richer in concepts than in the moving passages that characterized her stories, but it is lucid, unpretentious, and often witty. Ironically, the chapters with the greatest cultural authenticity -- about the dissident's dysfunctional Los Angeles host family and its Hollywood social milieu -- are the least satisfying.
Publishers Weekly
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. [10 July 2006, p.49]
Salon Andrew O'Hehir
Compulsively readable despite its length; Freudenberger has the kind of old-fashioned storytelling gift you can't learn in any MFA program.
The Guardian Alfred Hickling
A bold, absorbing debut whose confident thematic combination of emotional and artistic counterfeit suggests that Freudenberger is most certainly the genuine article.
San Francisco Chronicle Elizabeth Rosner
The Dissident offers readers a profusion of reflections and insights that will linger long after the book has been read. Unfortunately, there is also a clutter of derivative images that prove distracting and less than engaging, "types" who remind us that original artistry is not an easy art to master.
Kirkus Reviews
The book is significantly flawed, by awkwardly handled exposition and several uncomfortably close echoes of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. [1 June 2006, p.535]
Christian Science Monitor Marjorie Kehe
For all its skill, in the end The Dissident never quite delivers the punch it first seems to promise.
Los Angeles Times Susan Kandel
Though The Dissident is emphatically a first novel — it is long and in the end weighed down by its ambitions rather than buoyed up by them — such moments of crystalline clarity are themselves "rare birds," the stuff of second, third and fourth novels.
Library Journal Starr E. Smith
Energetic, witty writing sparkles throughout a story with much satiric potential, but sketchy characterizations and passages of tedious exposition prevent its delivering fully on its promise.
Entertainment Weekly Karen Valby
Her ambition may have gotten in the way of her art, but what a treat to see a young writer taking risks.
Booklist Michele Leber
Although the climax is less than satisfying, getting there is generally a pleasure, given Freudenberger's facile, insightful prose and strong characterizations.
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Kevin Chong
Yuan's sections make The Dissident worth reading. Unfortunately, the parts dealing with Cece and family aren't nearly as successful.
Washington Post Han Ong
This scrupulousness deserves praise, even if, in the end, the experiment is not wholly successful.
Village Voice Hua Hsu
But her characters, while inviting, rarely feel complicated enough to respond to her story's delicately layered conceit—or guard its not-so-jarring secret.
Wall Street Journal Tara Gallagher
The overall effect, however, can be somewhat dry, unhelped by the occasional stiff attempts at humor. Nonetheless, Ms. Freudenberger's examination of the effect of lies in art and life succeeds in revealing interesting truths about both.
Chicago Tribune Veronique de Turenne
There's such promise in "The Dissident," and reflection and insight and understanding. You can practically see her learning on the page. She has a gift that, to make the final transition from short story to novel, just needs to be strengthened a bit, and drawn out.
The Independent Scarlett Thomas
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 Independent Mary Flanagan
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 New York Times Book Review A. O. Scott
The Dissident has a random, hectic rhythm. Like an eager and generous dinner-party hostess, Freudenberger assembles a vivid assortment of interesting people and then isn’t quite sure what to do with them. As a result, the novel’s focus blurs and drifts.
New York Observer Jon Baskin
By the end of the novel, the dissident strikes us as little more than a funnel through which pours useless detail. Ms. Freudenberger’s research yields some compelling ruminations on Chinese politics and art, but nothing that saves her protagonist from falling flat on the page. [28 Aug 2006]
 The average user rating for this book is 5.6 (out of 10) based on 3 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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