GREAT NECK

Weighing in at nearly 800 pages, Cantor's epic effort to frame the experience of growing up Jewish on Long Island with the radicalism of the '60s and '70s is a chaotic, unfocused sprawl, a book bursting with an overwhelming number of subplots, characters, tangents and the occasional illuminating episode. Cantor introduces his core Long Island peer group in the early chapters, with the most compelling sections exploring the dilemma of Beth Jacobs, an activist who escapes imprisonment after being indicted for a bombing at MIT, only to find herself incarcerated with her African-American counterpart after a robbery goes awry. Cantor then bounces back and forth between the Long Island story lines and those dealing with the African-American group of civil rights activists. Members of the huge cast of characters include Beth's longtime friend Laura, an psychoanalyst with multiple sclerosis; brilliant, scrawny comic book artist Billy Green, who transforms his friends into superheroes; hardcore militant Sugar Cane; and Jacob Battle, a more conflicted revolutionary. Cantor is an accomplished writer who churns up enough material for at least two decent novels here, and both the coming-of-age stories and the race-related material might have worked nicely as either stand-alone books or as part of an ongoing series. But in a single volume, his hyperactive plotting renders parts of the book almost unreadable. The author employed this sort of comprehensive narrative style successfully in The Death of Che Guevara, but given the familiarity of the material, the elliptical, labyrinthine nature of this book will try the patience of even his most avid fans. Author tour.(Jan.)