John Freeman

Recently, writer Nell Freudenberger taught a class on the short story at George Mason University in Virginia. The workshop went well, and as their time wound down, Freudenberger, 32, asked the group of budding writers if they had any lingering questions.

"They said, `Actually, we were assigned to google you before the class,'" Freudenberger remembers. They then proceeded to grill her about what they had found on the web. "I said to them, `Not fair! I didn't get to google you guys!"'

Ms. Freudenberger gently crinkles her brow, then resumes a more guarded, if baffled, expression. "I never google myself," she says.

It's probably good for her sanity if she doesn't start. Were Freudenberger to do so she would learn that "hating Nell Freudenberger...is a virtual cottage industry among ambitious literati," as novelist Curtis Sittenfeld put it. It's not just that Freudenberger is young, pretty and successful, as Sittenfeld points out, or that the first short story she "ever felt like was even remotely worth publishing" was printed in the New Yorker. She is also immensely talented on top of it all.

Her first book, "Lucky Girls," a collection of five long short stories,

relaunched the far-flung American-abroad tale with new subtlety and grace. On its basis Freudenberger became the youngest PEN/Malamud short-story award-winner ever, and took home the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction.

Sitting in a leather armchair at SoHo House in Manhattan's meat-packing district, Freudenberger seems genuinely oblivious to the hoo-ha she creates. The word "I" does not come natural to her--she shoehorns her sentences around it, stuffing "you" and "one" and anything else in its place if she has to. In a city known for its sharp-elbowed climbers she seems decadently left-coast.

And that's because she is. A Los Angeles native, Freudenberger has tapped into her California past in her debut novel, "The Dissident," the story of a visiting Chinese painter named Yuan Zhao who spends a year at St. Anselm School for Girls in Los Angeles, living out in the converted pool house of the Travers family. The book was recently long-listed for the Orange Prize.

Zhao's appearance causes ripples in the community, most notably among the Traverses, who already have their hands full. Mother Cece is just getting over an affair with her brother-in-law, who has turned their exploit into a screenplay he's hocking. Cece's sister-in-law, Joan, an unhappily single struggling novelist, begins to cannibalize Zhao's story for a book. Meanwhile, Cece's husband continues his glacial continental drift away, and their children stagger into late teenage melodramas.

Freudenberger says the novel is inspired by a visiting teacher she had at the Marlborough School in Los Angeles, which she attended. "He didn't speak English. He came from China. And he was supposed to teach us how to paint with ink and brushes. If you could manage rocks, you went on to bamboo, and if you could manage that, finally you got to paint a lobster. He was the first

I'd ever had--coming from the progressive, private American system of education--who told us we were wrong."

In many ways, Freudenberger is both the product of this system and proof that it isn't just a conveyor belt of indulged thinkers. Her father, Daniel Freudenberger, was a theater director before moving into writing for television. Freudenberger's mother went back to school after raising her two daughters to get an English degree. After graduating from Harvard, Freudenberger went to Thailand to teach English and discovered writing instead. "I didn't really have anything to say about being an American until I went and lived in that high

school and was kind of confronted by my American-ness every day," she says.

"The baht crashed that year, so all the money I had was worth twice as much as the money my colleagues had that year and they were really conscious of that, and of course that made me really conscious of that--and very uncomfortable about it, too."

Freudenberger came to America with a fistful of letters she had written and some really bad fiction, on the basis of which she began studying to get an MFA at New York University, where she says she wrote another "really bad" novel.

She also landed a day job at the New Yorker, where she became assistant to the fiction editor, Bull Buford. "I thought because it was the New Yorker and there were famous writers there that people wouldn't have any time for you," Freudenberger says. "But it was amazing. They let us write little sidebars in the magazine. They really encouraged us."

Freudenberger says she needed it, for after "Lucky Girls" was published in the debut fiction issue in 2000 she became the target of a publishing bidding war and wound up with a contract and a book to write. "I never expected to be able to do this full-time, and I was kind of surprised that it would happen," she says now. "I started out having this panic every day that I would somehow not be able to do it--I don't have that anymore."

But she still had to prove that "Lucky Girls" wasn't the fluke. So when "The Dissident" was published in the U.S. last fall, some reviewers wondered whether Freudenberger had simply transplanted her own publishing pressures and anxieties into the life of her character Yuan Zhao, who begins to feel pressured to produce art that will meet his Western host's expectations of him.

Upon further consideration today Freudenberger admits there is some truth to this observation. "That makes sense," she says, "but I think it happens to everybody who writes, because the time between when you publish something and the time when you're asked to be public about it is the time when you feel least like a writer."

This sense of fakery rears its head throughout "The Dissident," in which everyone turns out to be fronting a series of secrets and lies, including the supposedly noble artist himself, who tells his story in a series of chapters that are striking for their portrait of Beijing's art scene. Freudenberger says she became interested in Chinese dissidents after attending a gallery showing in New York of Chinese artists. She followed up with a research trip, then another, during which she met the Beijing photographer, Rong Rong.

"The thing that interests me about those East Village artists was the idea that they were working under this crucible of political pressure," Freudenberger says. "Then they became so successful--and I wondered whether or not their work changed after it became celebrated in public, whether they needed that political resistance to create."

It may seem wildly improbable that a privileged, white American writer, drawn to the front-lines of avant-garde art in part by a sense of her own great expectations, could make anything worth reading--but it's true. On the basis of "The Dissident," Freudenberger was recently tapped by Granta magazine as one of America's Best Young Novelists, an accolade again she didn't seek out but that will almost certainly give the literati one more reason to harrumpf. With "The Dissident," she proves what a shame it would be if they didn't read the book first.

(2007-04-24)

Also by John Freeman

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Dara Horn, 30, is a scholar of Yiddish and Hebrew literature who is gaining recognition for her novels, "In the Image" and "The World to Come." Akhil Sharma, 35, who was born in India and raised in New Jersey, is a former investment banker whose debut novel "An Obedient Father" won critical plaudits
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Nonfiction Review
With James Frey facing Oprah's wrath, Harvard novelist Kaayva Viswanathan disgraced and nearly one-third of American college students cheating, many claimed we had an epidemic of plagiarism on our hands. Not so fast, says Richard Posner, a judge on the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals
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Mumbai on the Make
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Strange Feelings
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Palenstinian Consideration
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Thought Full Gifts
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Sky's the Limit
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POETRY REVIEW
(2006-10-24)

Without a Home
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NONFICTION REVIEW
(2006-10-10)

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