Eventually, Nell Freudenberger will have written so many wonderful books that we’ll stop gossiping about how success fell into the young woman’s lap at age 26.
The tale of her sudden fame is the stuff of writers’ fantasies — a nerdy version of Lana Turner being discovered on a soda fountain stool. In 2001, while working as an editorial assistant at the New Yorker, Freudenberger had her first story published in the magazine, along with an alluring photo of herself lounging on a purple blanket. Vogue and Elle swooned. (A lot of us did.) A bidding war broke out over her first — at the time, unwritten — book. Prizes and fellowships followed. Granta named her one of the Best Young American Novelists. “Hating Nell Freudenberger,” Curtis Sittenfeld wrote in Salon, “is a virtual cottage industry among ambitious literati.”
(Knopf/Random House) - “The Newlyweds: A Novel” by Nell Freudenberger.
Her new book should ramp up that cottage industry to major envy manufacturing. “The Newlyweds” is a delight, one of the easiest book recommendations of the year. (An excerpt appeared in the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” series in 2010.) The cross-cultural tensions and romance so well drawn here recall the pleasures of Monica Ali’s “Brick Lane” and Helen Simonson’s “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand.” On a recent trip to St. Louis, I read most of it out loud to my wife, and we both fell in love with Freudenberg’s Bangladeshi heroine.
As the story begins, Amina Mazid is living in Rochester, N.Y. It’s been six months since she left her parents back in Dhaka. Her new husband, George, is “a thirty-four-year old SWM who was looking for a wife” on AsianEuro.com. Because “he was a romantic,” they corresponded for almost a year before she flew to the United States. Now she’s sitting in her impossibly comfortable American house, trying to learn everything she can about her new country. “She was lucky,” Freudenberger writes, “because George corrected her and kept her from making embarrassing mistakes. Americans always went to the bathroom, never the loo. They did not live in flats or stow anything in the boot of the car, and under no circumstances did they ever pop outside to smoke a fag.” But as difficult as our colloquial phrases are, Amina finds American sarcasm and passive aggression even more mysterious: “Quarrels at home were explosive, public, and necessarily brief,” she notes. “In Rochester, Amina thought it might be possible to stay angry for a lifetime.”
Freudenberger’s story collection, “Lucky Girls,” and her first novel, “The Dissident,” displayed her sensitivity to the anxious interaction between Americans and people from other countries, and in this new novel she articulates that apprehension with winning comedy and poignancy. She’s that rare artist who speaks fluently from many different cultural perspectives, without preciousness or undue caution. Informed by her travels in Thailand, India and China, she understands the complicated negotiations that always attend contacts between people of radically different backgrounds, no matter how accommodating they claim to be.
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