Volume 53, Number 16 · October 19, 2006
The Terrified Copyist
By Jennifer Schuessler
The Dissident
by Nell Freudenberger
Ecco, 427 pp., $25.95
With Lucky Girls, her 2003 story collection about privileged young Americans abroad, Nell Freudenberger announced herself as a young writer of unusual grace and promise. If she didn't make the subject entirely new, she updated it for the early twenty-first century, when the grand tour takes recent graduates not to the Uffizi and the banks of the Seine but to AIDS orphanages in Bangkok and half-baked language schools in Delhi, and the goal isn't sentimental education but a kind of inner evasion. As a housekeeper in one of the stories puts it, 'Traveling is for people who don't know how to be happy.'
Review, 1734 words
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