Great Neck - Softcover

Cantor, Jay

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375713395 ISBN 13: 9780375713392

Publisher: Vintage, 2004

Synopsis

In 1960, a group of friends are plucked from their sixth grade classroom in privileged Great Neck, Long Island and confronted for the first time with the horrors of the Holocaust. They hear a challenge from the past, a cry from history to set the world on a better course; but it is the murder of a much-loved older brother during Mississippi’s Freedom Summer that makes their mission clear.

From the front line of the civil rights movement to Andy Warhol’s New York art scene, from comic book superheroes to the violent maelstrom of the Weather Underground, Great Neck immerses us in a charged time not so long ago, and illuminates the lives of those who were shaped by its energies and ideals. Vigorous, funny, profound and altogether gripping, it is a masterpiece of contemporary literature.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"A bold and penetrating novelist dedicated to exploring the psychology of revolution, Jay Cantor works on a Tolstoyan scale as he maps a historic time of violent and necessary change, and illuminates the evolving psyches of a diverse cast of compelling characters as deeply affected by the legacies of anti-Semitism and racism as by their involvement in a many-faceted, epic struggle for justice. Thirteen years in the making, this is a virtuosic work of heart and genius, a great, singing web of a novel."
--Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

“A big, brilliant social novel . . . Cantor does with language what a geologist does with transparencies, setting one page upon the other, so you can see through a tunnel of time . . . From nonviolence to the Black Panthers to something resembling the Symbionese Liberation Army, Cantor’s characters are everywhere, illustrating modes of political engagement from innocence to experience to exhaustion.”
–Leslie Brody, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“An amazing achievement . . . hugely entertaining . . . painted with minute and careful strokes and subtle colors . . . Mr. Cantor captures this culture and these distinct lives with astonishing affection and detail, with imaginative humor and a nuanced intellectual mastery: He’s one of those rare writers who can show credible lives infused with actual ideas . . . The town Mr. Cantor has created [is] a real and unforgettable place: Mr. Cantor’s language, wit, historical intelligence, technical skill and far-reaching literary philosophy have made it so.”
–Vince Passaro, The New York Observor

“The great American novel . . . A ‘Comedie Humaine’ for the American suburbs . . . [Great Neck has a] rococo, encyclopedic, empire of a plot. Readers are whisked at warp speed from a Long Island junior high to Harvard, Boston SDS houses to Mississippi courthouses, psychiatrists’ couches to cornfields, prisons to protest marches . . . Great Neck has a Trollopian range — heartbreak to hilarity. And the style is richly allusive and splendidly sardonic . . . reading this novel is trippy and exhilarating, like defusing a bomb while skateboarding. It’s real American literature as the likes of Melville understood it.”
–Diane Roberts, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"I'd rather read Great Neck than go there!  Jay Cantor has the soul of a Delta bluesman, the mind of a high energy particle physicist, and the glands of a teenage comic book whiz kid.  I became instantly infatuated with every member of the Band of Outsiders, each beautifully flawed and beautifully human, and stand-ins for an entire generation caught up in one America's most chaotic eras.  They became even more flesh and blood to me than Clark Kent or Peter Parker.  Great Neck is a literary neutron bomb, a multi-layered, polyrhythmic, pulsing, sustained explosion of talent.  History, fantasy, comedy and social reality are so effortlessly blended that one wonders if Cantor isn't really a super hero masquerading as a great artist.  It annoys me when people are unjustifiably called originals: Jay Cantor really is one.  He is a mad comic genius, easily in the class of Gaddis, Gass and Pynchon.  Great Neck is a rare delight, well worth the wait." --Randall Kenan

“Great Neck is a wonderful novel, deserving of every minute spent with the many revelations folded within the energy and brilliance of its pages. In his re-creation of the Sixties, Jay Cantor has constructed a stunning epic, rich in its comic turns, yet fully invested in the political and personal consequences that mark his characters forever. With historical and emotional accuracy, Great Neck looks back to deliver us to the present with its harsh truths, memories, and longing.”
–Maureen Howard

“Great Neck is a brilliantly confrontational novel that comes at us straight-on and sideways as we enter the characters’ minds to take an emphatically disorienting roller coaster ride that dips into the always anxiety-provoking terrain of race and class in America. And if that’s not enough, Jay Cantor has created a character who intermittently (and ironically) re-casts their struggles as comics. It’s an impressive performance: part fact, part fiction — as everyday life in America always is.”
–Ann Beattie

About the Author:

Jay Cantor is the author of two other novels, The Death of Che Guevara and Krazy Kat, and two books of essays, The Space Between: Literature and Politics and On Giving Birth to One’s Own Mother. A MacArthur Prize fellow, Cantor teaches at Tufts University and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife Melinda Marble, and their daughter, Grace.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0375713395
• ISBN 13: 9780375713392
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 720