The leap from first story collection to first novel is a difficult one. The stories in Nell Freudenberger’s collection, “Lucky Girls,” were elegant and exotic. Three of the five were set in India, a fourth in Bangkok; many of the characters were Americans abroad. Like many stories in the New Yorker, where Ms. Freudenberger was once an assistant (as was I, though not at the same time) and where she published her debut story, the stories in “Lucky Girls” eschewed dramatic plot twists for endings that turned on quiet, stylishly etched epiphanies.

A novel requires more than quiet epiphanies. In “The Dissident” (Ecco, 430 pages, $25.95), Ms. Freudenberger has not only drawn in more cultural history, but she has also constructed a capital “P” plot. The dissident is a young Chinese artist, Yuan Zhao, who receives a fellowship to come to Los Angeles to pursue his work, while teaching at a private girls’ school. He lives with a family from the school, the Traverses, and the story of his past and his American stay unfolds along with their stories.

Cece Travers resembles the main character, also a wife and mother, in “The Orphan,” one of the stories in “Lucky Girls.” Cece lives in material luxury — the Traverses’ spotless L.A. home, with its pool and lush garden, is vividly evoked — but is unhappy. She is loving and well-meaning, but her family members have all, in their various ways, rejected her. Her teenage son is angry and depressed; her teenage daughter is self-preoccupied; her marriage to Gordon has been sexless for 10 years.Years ago, she had an affair with Gordon’s brother, Phil. At the time of the novel, Phil has turned their affair into a play, which was picked up by a Hollywood studio, precipitating Phil’s arrival in L.A. shortly after the dissident’s.

Although the dissident is the only character to speak in the first-person, the chapters alternate among him, Cece, Phil, Gordon, and Phil’s sister Joan, a frustrated writer who hopes to find in the dissident’s past the seed of a novel.

From the beginning the dissident’s identity and interior are shrouded in layers of self-obfuscation. “As I’ve said, I am an expert in one thing; and so this will be a story about counterfeiting, and also about the one thing you cannot counterfeit,” he promises in the first chapter, after describing his talent for copying the painters of others. “I see what people want, and I give it them,” he says, implying that he is incapable of revealing, let alone acting upon, his genuine feelings.

This sensitivity to appearances both separates him and doesn’t from the boisterous, but publicity-savvy, group of artists he was part of in China. In sketching the dissident’s background, Ms. Freudenberger has drawn on a real episode in recent Chinese history: a period from 1993 to 1994 when avantgarde artists congregated in a dilapidated neighborhood on the Eastern outskirts of Beijing that they called the “East Village.” The community broke up when several of the artists were arrested in June of 1994. Later, the neighborhood was razed and replaced with a large forested park.

Ms. Freudenberger has clearly done her research.The details of her description of the East Village — the artists’ masochistic performances, the physical grimness of the neighborhood — are believable. She invokes a real photographer from the group, changing his name from Rong Rong to Zhang Tianming; she turns a real scholar of the East Village movement, Wu Hung, of the University of Chicago, into the fictional Harry Lin, of UCLA — the man who brings the dissident to America.

In spite of such details, however, the artistic stakes among this renegade community never feel quite real. Perhaps this is because we see the group through the eyes of the dissident, who is supposed to be the shy young cousin of one of the most prominent artists.To him, the art is not as important as the feeling of being included. His East Village ends not with the arrests of June 1994, but a month earlier, when he suffers a more personal kind of betrayal.

Creating a central character who is a counterfeit and a dissembler is problematic: How can the reader know his feelings well enough to empathize with him? Fortunately, the dissident is not as much of a cipher, at least emotionally, as he proclaims himself to be. “The one thing that you cannot counterfeit” must be love, because certainly his seems real. We feel the pain of his broken heart, as well as the buoyancy of the new love that he finds in L.A. This is the novel’s greatest accomplishment.

Its weakness is in its scale: As in a picture blown up too large, Ms. Freudenberger’s writing here doesn’t quite maintain the elegance, precision, and seriousness of her stories. There are beautiful moments, but there are also silly scenes — caricatures of cocky young screenwriters, or snobby privateschool girls — and less-than-fully developed characters. There is a final plot twist that doesn’t completely add up, to which too much of the story’s energy is directed.

The novel’s subject is timely, though. Contemporary Chinese art is hot: In March, Sotheby’s first sale of contemporary Asian art netted $13.2 million. A sculpture by Zhang Huan (possibly the model for the dissident’s cousin) sold for $408,000, and a photograph of one of his performance pieces from the 1990’s for $78,000 — far more than the $7,000 quoted in one of the novel’s last chapters for a similar photograph in a Chinese gallery. Like performance art, like the artists’ community of the East Village, art-market trends are both surreal and ephemeral. Perhaps it’s not surprising that a novel that draws on these things should be so, too.