"Great Neck" is a big, brilliant, social novel swarming with laments. Jay Cantor's book traverses several decades, opening in 1978, as six childhood friends from Great Neck, Long Island, reunite in a courtroom. One of them, Beth Kaplan, has been accused of setting bombs a decade earlier to protest the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Now, 10 years later, she seems a casualty of bad timing, the float that arrives long after the parade has passed.

This sense of how history can strand a person is one of Cantor's accomplishments. Here is an encyclopedia of rage: black rage, Irish working-class rage, the rage of youth, of young women, righteous rage, lovers' rage, rage at the past, at futility, at being alive -- as if that too was a punishment -- scary, painful, adolescent, political rage, rage in a wheelchair, genius thwarted, genius squandered. Rage at how quickly things happened and how quickly they were over. Nobody has a happy ending. "There is plenty of hope," Cantor quotes Kafka. "Just not for us."

-- Leslie Brody

*How to Breathe Underwater

Stories

Julie Orringer

Alfred A. Knopf: 228 pp., $21

A little girl, her front tooth coming loose, fidgets in her velvet party dress one particularly hot Thanksgiving in New Orleans. Ella, her parents and her younger brother Benjamin, dressed in his Pilgrim costume, are en route to spend the holiday not, as usual, with relatives, but with strangers: people who eat seaweed and conduct exotic healing rituals. Ella's mother has been undergoing chemotherapy and has also been pursuing spiritual and holistic approaches to treating her cancer. Thanksgiving with these strangers is simply another oddity for the family to cope with. "Shoes off now!" a crayoned sign directs them on arrival, and this is only the mildest of several shocks that Ella will experience in the course of the visit. "Pilgrims," the first of nine short stories in Julie Orringer's arresting debut collection, "How to Breathe Underwater," displays this writer's gift for portraying the world from a child's (or, in other stories, a teenager's) perspective. Many writers have a knack for evoking a child's sensibility. (For aspiring authors, adopting a juvenile viewpoint has practically become a default mode.) But the ability to tell a story -- and keep readers eagerly turning pages -- is less common than might be supposed. Throughout the collection, Orringer's engaging wit, her eye for social detail, her ear for patterns of speech and thought, and her insights into human nature proclaim her a writer to be reckoned with.