By Nell Freudenberger. HarperCollins, 427 pp, $32.95, hardcover.

It sounds possibly like a sitcom or, yikes, reality television. Send a Chinese performance artist to live with a messed-up, affluent family in Beverly Hills. Wacky hilarity ensues! Get the dissident, Yuan Zhao, to teach painting to untalented but socially precocious teens at an all-girls high school. Bring back psychiatrist husband Gordon's long-lost brother, Phil, who's just sold a million-dollar screenplay””and, incidentally, once had an affair with Gordon's wife, CeCe””to live in the pool house. Get son Max a Hispanic girlfriend from the barrio, and let ballerina daughter Olivia run with the school's mean girls. Oh, and why not set a bush baby loose in the back garden. Monkeys are always funny!

This gutsy first novel by Nell Freud?en?berger (who became known through her short-story collection Lucky Girls) is, indeed, wryly, slyly, frequently funny. For instance, Zhao's Beijing cousin advises him to show his American hosts the famous Tian?anmen Square photo and “Just tell them that was you.” And there are Freudenberger's truly inspired, filmic set pieces: the bush baby gets loose on an airplane (monkeys on a plane!); and Phil, worried that “the fact that he couldn't get into hip-hop was a serious failing”, has a ridiculously funny meeting with his video game–obsessed screenwriting partners, Steve and Keith, and Steve's knockout Latina girlfriend who's “only twenty, and she's already written a telenova”.

In Zhao's stiff, not entirely engaging narration””Freudenberger skillfully wields breezier third-person narratives tailing CeCe, Phil, and Phil's hilariously jealous writer sister, Joan””we travel back to Beijing's squalid-hip 1990s East Village, where artists stage happenings involving naked, gender-unspecific participants, rope, breathing tubes, and paparazzi. Freudenberger's deadpan satire shows she gets the silly-seriousness of that actual period in Chinese performance art””the events have names like Something That Is Not Art and Buried Alive: #1””and gradually reveals that her dissident may not be as he seems.

Some readers will be left wanting more of the compulsively likable characters and Freudenberger's dead-on riffing and ribbing on art, talent, and competitiveness. There's a lonely need for acceptance””scenes of adults seeking approbation from aloof teens are particularly wistfully amusing””yet nobody seems to “get” themselves or each other. Uncle Phil muses: “It was clear, no matter how loyal he was, that from now on he would be playing on the grownups' team. The thought was deeply depressing.” In The Dissident there are many angles on art, but no one has a real angle on the art of life.

Nell Freudenberger appears at the Vancouver International Writers Festival next Saturday (October 21) at 8 p.m. at the Waterfront Theatre and next Sunday (October 22) at 11 a.m. at Performance Works.