‘Ooohh’ I thought when I first looked at the cover, imagining a subtle yet punchy writing style that would combine the trauma of the, as yet anonymous, dissident’s personal life in some oppressive tin-pot dictatorship, with the broad drama of international espionage and realpolitik. I more or less imagined the author of the book to be Tom Clancey with ovaries.

But I was wrong and glad of it, because The Dissident is something much more interesting and complex than first glance would have you believe. The plot centres on a Chinese experimental artist who has purportedly won critical acclaim on the international art circuit for his work in the ‘East Village’ of Beijing in the aftermath of the events in Tiananmen Square. He is invited to take an honorary professorship for a year at a private girl’s school in the moneyed snake-pit that is the habitat of the well to do in Los Angeles. Whilst there he is billeted with the Travers family, who outwardly seem to embody the elusive American Dream.

It soon becomes apparent that neither the artist, Yuan Zhao, nor the Travers, are what they seem to be. Instead of using the professorship as a springboard for carrying on with his own work, and getting it publicised as his hosts expect, Zhao instead prefers teaching the teenage girls at his host school. He also appears suspiciously modest for a great artist, insisting that he is only ‘a brilliant copyist’, and constantly deferring to his cousin, a fellow East Village artist. Meanwhile the home life of his hosts, the Travers, while seeming outwardly happy, actually turns out to be as fragile as a stricken U-Boat. It is as though the vastness of the Beverley Hills mansion they inhabit actually swallows each of the family members up, somehow accounting for the complete lack of meaningful communication between them.

What makes Freudenberger’s almost-debut novel (she has previously had a selection of short stories published) impressive is her use of a complex narrative structure to encompass the perspectives of four different characters. Zhao’s narrative jumps in the first person between his time in LA and his formative years as a student artist in the East Village. Cece Travers’ narrative meanwhile, depicts her struggles to maintain her family’s cohesion, in the face of her husband Gordon’s aloof disposition, her daughter’s imminent departure for college and her teenage son’s slightly tiresome angst and depression.

The danger inherent in this format is that it is possible the author could end up sketching out the characters without endowing them with the depth they might have had, especially if the author had stuck to a single narrator and point of view. But this does not end up being a problem here. Well actually it sort of does…but it counts in the book’s favour as it means Zhao’s character and past can be revealed piece by piece. In a sense, Freudenberger has characterisation and exposition running side by side, rather than having them run in that order, which creates a genuine sense of surprise at the end of the novel, when we learn about the dissident’s true nature at the same time his hosts do.

The obvious problem with this technique is pacing. With Zhao taking up a good half of the narration space, and his character being explored in tandem with lurches between the present and the past, the plot of The Dissident veritably trundles along, like a donkey ride on Blackpool Beach, as though the constant Californian sunshine has somehow bled through onto the pages of the book, slowing everything down. However, this is countered by the subplots featuring Gordon’s younger siblings, Joan and Phil, as they unconsciously compete against one another in an attempt to find meaning and success in their lives. Phil is the feckless, wandering younger brother who shows up at the Travers’ house having sold his screenplay, cheekily based on his affair with Cece, for a million dollars, and he comes bearing a pet ‘bush baby’ as a gift. Joan is a writer, serious and embittered by Phil’s unexpected success as ‘someone who (only) dabbled in literature, the way he dabbled in theatre, in women, and in life in general’.

The Observer reviewer complained that Zhao’s character had failed to shine through. I disagree. Although his character appears suspiciously wishy-washy and bland at the start, it serves to highlight the artist’s discomfort at his own deception. It is also one of the interesting ideas of the novel that ‘culture clash’ can extend beyond traditional, superficial concerns; idiosyncrasies of language, customs etc, into more fundamental areas, such as identity. In the beginning of the novel it is a supreme irony that Cece Travers, in her eagerness to be understanding and welcoming to the artist, imprisons Zhao in the role of The Dissident by her own expectations. Expectations that are entirely incongruent with Zhao’s view of himself.

What surprised me was the fact that, given the amount of time Freudenberger has obviously spent researching this period of upheaval in Chinese art, she doesn’t harp on about the obvious questions. What is art? What’s it like being oppressed? Instead, she quite cleverly uses the narrative of the dissident as a mirror through which to evaluate and analyse the contemporary weirdness of the American Dream. It is something she probably feels more qualified to write about than Tiananmen era China. This benefits the tone of the novel, as Freudenberger writes with a kind of relaxed intelligence and precision, without trying to make herself sound like Wittgenstein or David Starkey or something. It makes her writing unpretentious and gives the sense that she is comfortable handling the China-based parts of her novel as she will be relating them back to Zhao’s present in LA.

Some who agrees with Muriel Grey’s recent comments about unambitious women authors only writing about ‘domestic stuff’ will probably argue that this book is limited by the author’s seemingly constrained imagination and will probably hold up The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney as a work of true imaginative genius. To an extent this is true, but I feel that in looking at her own culture Freudenberger is raising an important point. Zhao theorises that in his own work copying requires both the skill of a copyist, and the collusion of those who accept the copy as real. In the same way Cece’s accommodating acceptance of both the dissident’s identity and the imperfections of her own family makes the point that as modern society places so much emphasis on the primacy of the individual, it can lead to our dissociation from one another in order to ‘leave others be’. The example of the Travers shows this can lead to the collapse of group structures like the family unit.