No Dissin'

The Dissident
By Nell Freudenberger

Nell Freudenberger got a lot of hype a couple of years ago because she was very young and quite pretty and strikingly talented and delightfully intelligent and surprisingly worldly and ... it made people hate her. Or that was the angle that some of the hype took. She got a story in the New Yorker's big fiction issue and it got a lot of attention - at least among the circles that not only pay attention to the New Yorker, but to the fiction writers featured within its pages.
Anyway, she put out a collection of stories called "Lucky Girls" and it was pretty good. This is her first novel. The book comes out next month I picked up the advance reader's edition and it had a little insert with a note from Freudberger about some corrections she wanted to go into it. They were fairly minor things, but it seemed that she was taking a personal involvement in fixing them. Glad to see an author being careful.
I'd like to go into great detail about this novel. Maybe some other time. Let's just say this: I really enjoyed it, but it took a while to get going, there are too many characters and some of the storylines (a disintegrating marriage in wealthy Los Angeles; an improper teacher-student relationship at an exclusive girl's school; dealings with Hollywood screenwriters)are overfamiliar. More interesting to me were the stories dealing with the dissident's past in an underground artists community in Beijing. Maybe that's just because the setting is less familiar to me. Maybe if I knew more about Beijing I would have read that stuff and said, "Who is this gweilo writing about Chinese people?"
And I don't know how to put this: There is sort of a twist at the end, but I figured out what was going on pretty early on. So, I couldn't tell if I was supposed to be surprised or not. It didn't feel like a twist, but like some misinformation that took too long to be corrected. Maybe I just took a lucky guess, but I don't think so. I'm trying to get Ella to read it so I can ask what she thinks.
All that said, I did enjoy "The Dissident." I liked the central characters. The character Phil is especially well-rendered as a loveable loser.