Radicals from a Special Place

...and, notoriously, Beth Jacobs, a Weather Underground devotee who joins a group similar to the Black Panthers...

...Cantor's characters are interesting, and he effectively entwines their roots with a history that reaches down into both the radical labor movement and the Holocaust...

...Readers of Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay will remember that there is minimal interest in comic book tales without pictures, no matter how vividly the action is described...

...Beth and her coterie of revolutionaries bombing a lab at MIT to protest its connection to the Vietnam War...

...Sickly, eccentric Billy "Bad Ears" Green follows in his father's footsteps, becomes a comic book artist, and is soon precociously famous...

...In other words, Cantor has a big heart and is not afraid to show it...

...He dips into the thoughts not only of the principals but also of teachers, parents, colleagues, and, it seems, random passersby...

...The children get it about half right...

...Leo had once been one of those dirty animals, feeling weakness and confusion spurt up in him as he talked-the child's shame at his own dirt mixed with the inmate's fear as he got weaker and weaker....' Great Neck is full of emotionally charged scenes...

...Beth Jacobs'father listens to one of her colleagues try to justify the Brink's murders, and can only think his words "had a grand sound, but it forever meant egotism disguised as rigor...

...Jay Cantor has previously written two intriguing if not wholly compelling novels: Krazy Kat, about George Herriman's comic strip creation, and The Death of Che Guevara...

...My friend and I soon tune out, but not before one of us, mocking their nostalgic tone, says: "Great Neck-it's a special place...

...Although the action sends the group far afield, its members never sever their ties...

...His new book uses the Manhattan bedroom community as the seat of a drama that tracks a handful of friends from a 1960 sixth grade English class through the major political and social upheavals of the decade, as well as the repercussions they experience into the early '80s...

...Jeffrey Schell, watching his friend Harry die of AIDS, concludes, "Death is crap, and no SM game and no art could ever make it bearable...

...it garners the kind of rabid teenage fans who attend conferences dressed as their favorite BillyBooks characters...

...Cantor, in his expansiveness, in his attempt to grapple with difficult questions of race and revolt, history and up bringing, has done something laudable...

...She had resurfaced after years in hiding following the accidental bombing of the Greenwich Village townhouse where she lived with fellow radicals (her story often closely parallels that of actual Weather Underground member Kathy Boudin...

...Better use is made of characters with reallife counterparts (a Robert Mapplethorpe-type artist named Harry Hennessy, for example), who interact in rich and complex ways with the heroes...

...Here Sugar Cane remembers being held in solitary confinement: "Naked legs lapped by his own feces, it made him loathe himself...

...Its large lawns and houses lent status and a sense of safety, the two ideals Great Neck parents appear most interested in imparting to their children...

...Its plot is less a straight narrative than a dense web of intense, disparate peak events in its characters' lives: Billy in sixth grade breaking down in tears as he delivers an oral report on the Holocaust...

...Occasionally Cantor overreaches (we are asked to believe someone was "so damned tired he kept splitting infinitives") or settles for awkward images ("A foghorn sounded offscreen" doesn't work in a novel...

...In addition, there is Jeffrey Schell, son of art collectors, who is a gay art dealer turned artist...

...Jesse Kelman, a death row defense lawyer...

...His BillyBooks series fictionalizes the exploits of his crowd by turning them into '60s superheroes...

...Events are also recast too many times as excerpts fromBilly's feverish comic books...

...The effect is more like sitting through some screen epic from the 1950s-Imitation of Life, for instance...

...contributor, "Laurel Review," "Massachusetts Review" A good friend of mine married a woman from Great Neck, Long Island who, it turned out, knows my wife, also a native of that suburb...

...Apparently it is, however, to judge from this 700-plus page celebration by one of its literary sons...

...Great Neck -the novel-is indeed special...

...Laura's brother Frank undergoing a fierce beating in Mississippi while on the mid-'60s voter registration drive that ultimately results in his violent death...

...I would have preferred more careful plotting, and a good deal less strident arguing, but I admire the way the author explores a range of deeply held convictions...

...The entire Great Neck gang is at the bail hearing-Laura, Arkey, Billy, and Jeffrey as spectators, Jesse as Beth's attorney...

...Late in the story, when Beth is running with the militant black collective in Boston, you look forward to getting leader Sugar Cane's angle on things, or hearing ex-con Shakur's thoughts, or reading internal monologues from rednecks, black preachers and FBI special agents...

...The author achieves some of his most powerful effects in incidental moments that mirror more central scenes...

...His characters often express their feelings with unleavened directness, their judgments without ambivalence...

...The strongest bond of all, the mysterious delivery in 1964 of three letters seemingly written by Frank Jaffe, the recently killed brother of one of the cohort, is the engine of the plot...

...No one should ever die...

...The novel opens in 1978, with Beth about to go on trial...

...Billy dies after putting himself in the middle of the violence between Israel and Lebanon...

...Cantor uses an initially confusing technique of alternating narrative voices...

...she and the black activists over a decade later attempting to steal a Brink's armored vehicle at a suburban shopping center...

...His blend of explosive happenings and strong emotions does not leave you feeling the way you would after reading a comparably hefty contemporary novel by, say, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace, for whom irony and self-consciousness rule...

...Death is intolerable...

...Granted, things are looking up for Jesse and Arkey...

...Capital punishment law, African religion and the roots of the blues are covered, along with the intricacies of the radical student movements...

...It turns out there is a method to his inclusive madness, though, p nd about a third of the way through one grows accustomed to leaps in time and switches in perspective...

...He'd bit down on that feeling for a whilekeep himself from disappearing...

...Thrown in for good measure are occasional appearances by people like Andy Warhol, Malcolm X and composer Virgil Thomson that tend to be distracting, since Cantor does not make much more of the names he drops than the reader's prior knowledge provides...

...These people's lives are rather grand and they are all periodically in the public eye, but not one manages to stay entirely out of harm's way...

...I stink, therefore ?a??G Earlier, Bern's father, Leo Jacobs, recalled a similar degradation in Auschwitz during weekly inspections by a German officer: "Nowhere to wash, yet Jews who the man decided had too much filth between their toes had to run in circles in the freezing courtyard...

...Jewish achievers sought out places like Great Neck partly as a refuge from yesterday's battles and horrors...

...Yet no upstanding parent in Great Neck (or Shaker Heights or Palo Alto) would be entirely happy with this bunch: By the end Beth is convicted as an accessory to the Brink's job and gets a long prison sentence...

...Laura Jaffe, daughter of a Left-wing lawyer who is close to Martin Luther King Jr...

...When the four of us get together there always comes a point where the women begin to talk about their hometown...

...The actual authors of the missives are finally hunted down 15 years later in the deep South, allowing our protagonists to make peace with the legacy of their dead contemporary...

...and Laura, having escaped the psychological pull of her dead brother and his letters, has finally met a good man and had a baby-albeit at quite a cost...

...In between these actions that are mostly borrowed from history there are lengthy arguments for and against them...

...Arthur "Arkey" Kaplan, whose grandfather was a garment-workers union organizer, ends up a professor of labor relations and a sporadically successful writer of labor movement histories...

...Cantor has done a lot of research...

...To his credit, too, the author avoids the lure of tying things up neatly...

...and it always ended in murder...

...and the Kennedys, becomes a psychiatrist to drug addicts at a clinic on Manhattan's Lower East Side...

...Cantor does have a gift, however, for allowing his characters their fair share of uncertainty, for letting their idealism be founded not solely on lofty concepts like equality and justice but on guilt, fear and the pressing desire to please status-seeking parents...

...Jeffrey Schell has a close call with the mob before getting in the clear...