Cantor, (Alfred) Jay 1948-

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CANTOR, (Alfred) Jay 1948-

PERSONAL:

Born 1948, in Great Neck, NY; married Melinda Grace Marble; children: Grace. Education: Harvard University, graduated 1970; attended University of California—Santa Cruz.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Cambridge, MA. Office—c/o Tufts University, English Department, East Hall, Somerville, MA 02144. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Novelist, essayist, and educator.Tufts University, Somerville, MA, professor of English, literature, and creative writing.

AWARDS, HONORS:

MacArthur Prize, 1989.

WRITINGS:

The Space Between: Literature and Politics (essays), Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 1981.

The Death of Che Guevara (novel), Knopf (New York, NY), 1983.

Krazy Kat: A Novel in Five Panels, Knopf (New York, NY), 1987.

On Giving Birth to One's Own Mother: Essays on Art and Society, Knopf (New York, NY), 1991.

Great Neck (novel), Knopf (New York, NY), 2003.

SIDELIGHTS:

Tufts University professor and author Jay Cantor grew up in the Long Island, New York, community of Great Neck, which he would later write about in his mammoth novel of the same name. Cantor's first love, however, was comic books, which he devoured as a sickly child who often stayed home from school. In an interview with Regis Behe of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Cantor explained that "My way of learning about the world was always through stories, and I read a lot. Comic books were another way of telling stories—it got at the hyperbolic and the dreamlike and the fantasy elements that some other kinds of fiction didn't." Cantor drew on this love in his second novel, Krazy Kat: A Novel in Five Panels. His first book of essays, The Space Between: Literature and Politics, deals with politics and literature, and his first novel probes the psyche of South American revolutionary Che Guevara and the times in which he lived. In 1991, Cantor published a second book of essays, On Giving Birth to One's Own Mother: Essays on Art and Society, in which he discusses Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud in relation to postmodernism.

In The Space Between, Cantor discusses the political aspects of the work of Yeats, Shakespeare, Joyce, Beckett, and William Carlos Williams, among others, in the context of terrorist events of the 1960s and 1970s. He theorizes that art and politics are interrelated and can transform the individual and society. A contributor to Choice called the book "in equal parts, stimulating and self-indulgent." Lynne Bronstein, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, found that the book's academic "weightiness" spoils what could have been an interesting theory. Khachig Tölölyan, in a review for the Village Voice Literary Supplement, found the book to be "a thinly disguised intellectual autobiography." Although he thought some essays are "really first-rate," Tölölyan noted that others revolve around statements that are "suggestive, speculative," and "overly general." A contributor to Publishers Weekly, on the other hand, found the book to be "a fresh and provocative meditation on the cultural forces" that shaped Cantor's time.

Cantor based his first novel, The Death of Che Guevara, on the life of the Argentine revolutionary leader who assisted Fidel Castro in the Cuban revolution and was killed in Bolivia in 1967. In an interview with William Goldstein for Publishers Weekly, Cantor revealed that both The Space Between and The Death of Che Guevara were sparked by his own involvement in the antiwar movement of the 1970s, when he was a student at Harvard. The Death of Che Guevara took Cantor thirteen years to research and write and is nearly 600 pages long. Ken Capobianco, in an interview with Cantor for the Journal of Modern Literature, called it "a storytelling tour de force" and "certainly one of the most assured debuts of any contemporary novelist." Cantor made careful use of Guevara's journals, letters, and other communications, and thoroughly researched the lifestyle and folkways of the South American Indians. The story begins in 1966, as Guevara recalls his life after being sent into seclusion on an island by Castro as punishment.

Cantor's portrayal of the legendary leader is that of, according to Capobianco, "an asthmatic racked by self-doubts, confusion, and pain." It was this portrayal that reviewer Cynthia Grenier, in American Spectator, took issue with, commenting that Cantor's revolutionary hero "is a whiny, father-dominated, asthmatic, mean-spirited, humorless wimp." She also found that "Cantor's Indians are pseudo-mythic presences, owing more to Carlos Casteñada than to any direct observation of the Indians of the altiplano." Paul Berman, in a review for the New Republic, commented that although Cantor "has a gift for abstract thought and the psychology of politics," he "exhibits a far smaller gift for inventing characters. Everyone sounds the same." Berman concluded that although the amount of research Cantor put into the book is admirable, it resembles "one of those Third World dictatorships where the regime is badly beset by the consequences of its own grandiosity, by the lack of critical judgment, and by the flood tides of illiteracy."

Dean Flower, writing in the Hudson Review, saw the novel in a completely different light, viewing it as an exploration of the revolutionary forces at work in Latin American and other Third World nations, as seen through the eyes of those who lived with those forces. Flower wrote that Cantor knows his subjects completely: "He knows how soldiers curse, how guerrillas attack and escape, how a Bolivian Indian tells stories, how Fidel Castro presides over a meeting, … how political rhetoric endlessly yammers, what it feels like to have asthma." Flower thought Cantor's telling the story through recollections is the device that makes the novel work. Praising all the accounts in the novel, Flower concluded that the most vivid is "the long detailed account of how the Bolivian Indians resisted Che, listening in silence and then making him into a mythic figure, weaving him into their folklore and remaining themselves unchanged." Flower called the book "extraordinary."

In the interview with Capobianco, Cantor said that his way of making a plot new to readers when the story is already known, as with The Death of Che Guevara, "is by going deeper into the psychology of the characters." He said he prefers to give his readers the factual information up front before this discovery begins, "So we all start even and go more deeply into matters."

Cantor's second novel, Krazy Kat, is based on cartoon characters created by George Herriman and syndicated by William Randolph Hearst from 1913 until 1944, when Herriman died. The novel is divided into five "panels," which are based on issues Cantor feels are illustrative of post-World War II American society. The innocent Krazy Kat, blindly in love with Ignatz Mouse, who hits her in the head with bricks she believes are love tokens, follows Ignatz to Alamogordo, Mexico. There she loses her carefree innocence and retires from the comic strip after witnessing a test of "The Gadget" (the atomic bomb) and receiving a small radiation burn. In an effort to transform Krazy into a "rounded" twentieth-century personality, Ignatz tries psychotherapy ("The Talking Cure"), making an erotic film about her, involving her in a Patty Hearst-like terrorist kidnapping, and indulging her sexual fantasies. Ultimately, she and Ignatz become human and take their 1930s show on the road, as symbols of the new innocence.

In an interview with Barth Healey for the New York Times Book Review, Cantor said the sex scenes are about Krazy Kat's discovery of her own power: "We are not talking about sexual power, but the power to build her own artistic career." In a review for the Nation, Maureen Howard described this panel as "the least beguiling" of the five, but her overall opinion of the novel was that "Krazy Kat twinkles, is simply delicious."

Richard Eder, in a review for the Los Angeles Times Book Review, wrote, "The transformations of Krazy, Ignatz and the other characters … are accomplished with a real feeling for the spirit of the originals." However, said Eder, the book "only works intermittently.… Cantor has constructed an elaborate intellectual game for an engaging and provocative purpose. As a whole, it can be rather trying." P. Cousins, in a review for Choice, called it "a real oddity of a book." Thomas M. Disch, in the New York Times Book Review, found the plot of Krazy Kat to be "after a slow and somewhat bumpy takeoff, sprightly, delightful and insightful." Capobianco called the novel "a richly conceived meditation on the loss of innocence and a penetrating study of the modern consciousness."

Sybil Steinberg, in a review for Publishers Weekly, praised Cantor's "quirky wordplay" and "telling misspellings" and concluded that Krazy Kat, "perhaps slightly uneven and a shade overlong, is unfailingly intelligent, fully felt and tremendously moving." When Capobianco asked Cantor what attracted him to the character of Krazy Kat, the author responded, "She's adorable, yet also bewildering.… I loved Krazy, and I didn't know why, and that meant there was something to investigate." In his interview with Goldstein Cantor admitted: "I wrote Krazy Kat because, basically, I wanted to live in a comic strip."

Cantor followed Krazy Kat with a second book of essays, On Giving Birth to One's Own Mother: Essays on Art and Society. The title essay refers to the need to remake one's self, which Cantor considers a key component of modern art. In eight essays, he discusses Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—"the patriarchs of the tribes of the modern"—and their postmodern descendants, including movies and cartoons, as well as documentary films about the Holocaust. A contributor to Kirkus Reviews viewed the book in a negative light, commenting that Cantor "dishes up a postmodern soup of watered-down ideas in search of his identity, modernism, political affiliation, and … explanations of his own novels." In contrast, David Walton, in the New York Times Book Review, thought Cantor's "striking connections lead to a uniform and persuasive view of contemporary art and society." Richard Kuczkowski, reviewing the book for Library Journal, concluded that Cantor's "views are well worth serious consideration," and Genevieve Stuttaford, in Publishers Weekly, thought the collection displayed Cantor's gift as a critic as well as a novelist. Calling the book "seductive" and "wide-ranging," she concluded, "His clarity is a magical additive given the complexity of his ideas."

In his third and most personal novel, Great Neck, Cantor fictionalizes his experiences during the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s as he writes about a group of teens, most of them privileged and Jewish, from his hometown of Great Neck, on New York's Long Island. His characters empathize with the African-American struggle during the civil rights movement, join the Vietnam War protest movement, and deal with the ghosts of the Holocaust.

Great Neck is the story of Laura, whose older brother, Frank, is killed during Freedom Summer in the South as he helps African Americans register to vote; Beth, daughter of a Holocaust survivor, who becomes involved with the radical, violent Weathermen; Jeffrey, the gay son of an art collector, who joins the Andy Warhol art scene; the confused but helpful Arkey; the radical Sugar Cane; and Billy, who creates a comic-book series featuring his friends as superheroes. "It is the story-within-a-story technique and works quite well," commented Wayne Holliday in a review of the novel for the Decatur Daily.

Over 800 pages in length, Great Neck follows the main characters from sixth grade through adulthood, looking backward from its opening scene in 1978, when Beth is on trial in connection with a bombing a decade earlier in protest of the Vietnam War. Donna Seaman, of Booklist, found Great Neck to be "a virtuosic work of heart and genius, a great, singing web of a novel." Holliday concluded that Cantor "is a wordsmith and a lover of the musical and lyrical nature of language and his excellent prose is an exercise in that appreciation."

Robert E. Brown, in Library Journal, found the writing "topnotch" but thought the length "overwhelms our need to know." A Publishers Weekly contributor echoed that sentiment, saying there is enough material for two good novels, but that, combined as one, Cantor's "hyperactive plotting renders parts of the book almost unreadable," making it "elliptical" and "labyrinthine." A contributor to Kirkus Reviews likewise found it "Comprehensive and amusing. At 13 years in the making, should we be surprised that it's too long?"

Ken Tucker, in Entertainment Weekly, wrote that the novel successfully takes in the "idealism, adventurousness, … and tumult" of the 1960s and 1970s. Leslie Brody, in a review for the Los Angeles Times, described Great Neck as "a big, brilliant, social novel swarming with laments." Brody observed: "Cantor pops from one character's mind to another. Often you feel you are in the middle of a round of voices, multiplied streams of consciousness, fast and furious, a technique perhaps dizzying at first but ultimately profoundly satisfying." Although he opined that the novel sometimes seems "bloated," Adam Begley, writing in the New York Times Book Review, concluded: "Overflowing with brainpower—as though all the minds Cantor investigates were somehow networked and engaged in furious serial processing—it finds room for heart, too. It is, after all, a novel about friends."

Cantor's book is based in part on some of the author's childhood friends, and the incidents are thoroughly researched from news articles of the period. Behe, in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, pointed out that Cantor has created "a colorful portrait of a community in the midst of social and political changes." Commenting about the writing of Great Neck in his interview with Behe, the author noted: "Living through the events of the '60s, and particularly the anti-war movement, it felt to me, from what I knew of history, like something of a fresh subject … something I would want to write about. But many years had to pass.… It's not that you're cooler about it, but that you have more perspective."

In his interview with Capobianco, Cantor said he believes that people are "hungry for art that gives them new worlds and brings them new information.… I think the novel can still be the bright book of life, playful, adventurous, critical and self-critical, widening our sympathies and our understanding of what makes us—and how we might remake ourselves."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Literature in English, edited by Jenny Stringer, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1996.

PERIODICALS

American Spectator, July, 1984, Cynthia Grenier, review of The Death of Che Guevara, pp. 42-43.

Booklist, December 15, 2002, Donna Seaman, review of Great Neck, p. 732.

Choice, June, 1982, review of The Space Between: Literature and Politics, p. 1394; May, 1988, P. Cousins, review of Krazy Kat: A Novel in Five Panels, pp. 1398-1399.

Entertainment Weekly, January 24, 2003, Ken Tucker, review of Great Neck, p. 104.

Hudson Review, summer, 1984, Dean Flower, review of The Death of Che Guevara, pp. 314-316.

Journal of Modern Literature, summer, 1990, Ken Capobianco, "An Interview with Jay Cantor," pp. 3-11.

Kirkus Reviews, January 15, 1991, review of On Giving Birth to One's Own Mother: Essays on Art and Society, p. 85; November 1, 2002, review of Great Neck, p. 1548.

Library Journal, February 15, 1991, Richard Kuczkowski, review of On Giving Birth to One's Own Mother, p. 194; December, 2002, Robert E. Brown, review of Great Neck, p. 176.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 23, 1982, Lynne Bronstein, review of The Space Between, p. 16; January 10, 1988, Richard Eder, "Krazy Kat Comes of Age," p. 3; January 12, 2003, Leslie Brody, "The Burden of Survival, Borne by a Generation," p. R-6.

Nation, May 14, 1988, Maureen Howard, review of Krazy Kat, p. 682.

New Republic, December 12, 1983, Paul Berman, review of The Death of Che Guevara, p. 37.

New York Times Book Review, March 17, 1985, "Writing the Second Novel: A Symposium," pp. 1, 40; January 24, 1988, Thomas M. Disch, "To Be a Pussycat," pp. 1, 24, and Barth Healey, "Her Brilliant Career," p. 24; March 31, 1991, David Walton, review of On Giving Birth to One's Own Mother, p. 16; February 2, 2003, Adam Begley, "To Know Which Way the Wind Blows," p. 11.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, February 23, 2003, Regis Behe, "Jay Cantor Uses Quick, Chaotic Style to Get Feel of 1960s."

Publishers Weekly, November 13, 1981, review of The Space Between, p. 80; December 11, 1987, review of Krazy Kat, p. 47; January 8, 1988, William Goldstein, "Jay Cantor," pp. 65-66; February 8, 1991, Genevieve Stuttaford, review of On Giving Birth to One's Own Mother, p. 42; November 18, 2002, review of Great Neck, p. 43.

Village Voice Literary Supplement, May, 1982, Khachig Tölölyan, review of The Space Between, pp. 4-5.