BRIEFLY NOTED.(The Dissident)(The Keep)(The Conquest of Nature)(Brief article)(Book review)

The Dissident, by Nell Freudenberger (Ecco; $25.95). This beguiling first novel centers on a Chinese performance artist and former political prisoner, who travels to Los Angeles to accept a teaching fellowship at a prestigious girls' school. His hosts are a well-off family whose matriarch, Cece Travers, is trapped in a loveless marriage with Gordon, a psychiatrist obsessed with tracing his genealogy back to "the crossing ancestor." A large cast of secondary characters includes Gordon's sister Joan, an accomplished but discontented novelist who stays skinny "by worrying," and his charming but irresponsible brother Phil, who is single-mindedly in love with Cece. Freudenberger demonstrates great talent for capturing the subtleties of cross-cultural and intergenerational relationships, as the dissident's struggles with his past and with his art intersect with Cece's unravelling.

The Keep, by Jennifer Egan (Knopf; $23.95). This neo-gothic tale conjures a wicked form of therapy for BlackBerry-addicted urbanites. Egan sends Danny, her twitchy protagonist, on a trip from Manhattan to a crumbling Eastern European castle that is too remote for cell phones, television signals, even roads. Danny's mind, previously weighed down with useless information, takes flight, and he soon becomes unsure whether an alluring baroness he meets on the castle grounds is real or a figment. Egan's clever scenario presents Danny's mental liberation as both thrilling and dangerous--imagination is the ultimate drug, she suggests--and the novel luxuriates in Wilkie Collins-style atmospherics. But Egan spoils things with an unsavory framing device: Danny's story, we learn, has been written by a convict in a jail cell. The juxtaposition perversely suggests that prison is an even better place to unclutter your brain and summon a good yarn.

The Conquest of Nature, by David Blackbourn (Norton; ...