Shackling Water [Paperback]

Adam Mansbach (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 8, 2003

At the age of nineteen, saxophone prodigy Latif James-Pearson boards a bus to Manhattan to find his aging idol, the great Albert Van Horn. The centers of Latif’s universe soon become a Harlem boarding house, where he spends his days practicing intensely, and the downtown club where Van Horn's group performs and Latif hides in the shadows, listening. There, he begins a complex affair with an older white painter named Mona, and starts working for Say Brother, a charismatic drug dealer. But as Latif’s frustrations with his playing mount, and the demands of balancing artistry, hustling, and love push him toward crisis, he is forced to confront his music, his past, and himself. A virtuosic story told with lyrical intensity, Shackling Water heralds the arrival of an important new voice in American literature.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

STARRED REVIEW

A talented African-American saxophonist moves from Boston to Harlem to study with the jazz master he idolizes in Mansbach's first novel, a passionate debut that succeeds despite an abundance of plot cliches. Latif Pearson, the young protagonist, gets hooked on the sounds of Albert Van Horn; after years of building his chops, 19-year-old Latif gets up the nerve to make the move to New York, where he spends his nights watching Van Horn play from the sidelines. The dark side of Latif's debut comes when he takes a job running drugs for the local dealer, but he is able to make it work as he adds a relationship to the mix, falling in love with a beautiful white painter named Mona. The ambitious, precocious Latif idolizes Van Horn, but when the older musician finally invites him to some private jam sessions and then onstage, Latif puts so much pressure on himself that he implodes and succumbs to the lures of heroin. Mansbach gets past the hoary plot cliches with some strong characterizations, although his prose waxes purple when he writes about the music and Latif's street life: `The horn dipped and bobbed above the amniotic ocean... vanishing inside the grave of Icarus only to reanimate ichthyoid." Setting aside these flaws, both hardcore and would-be jazz fans will find plenty of meat on the bones of Mansbach's debut; with a more innovative plot, it might have been a truly memorable book. Agent, Richard R. Abate.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

This might be the best fictional work about jazz since James Baldwin's beautiful and soulful Sonny's Blues. A Knstlerroman (artist's novel), this first novel tells the story of Latif James-Pearson, an aspiring yet often self-doubting young African American, as he moves from Boston to New York to become a professional jazz saxophonist. The first third of the book is a verbal feast, as Mansbach's fiercely textured prose powerfully conveys the New York jazz scene of the 1990s and superbly echoes the rich cadence and rhythm of a fantastic jazz riff. While the novel loses some of its narrative momentum in the middle and latter stages of the story the main character's seemingly inevitable bout with narcotics is forced and probably unnecessary it nevertheless presents an often searingly moving and dense account of what motivates a young, talented jazz musician. Mansbach, who received his M.F.A. from Columbia University and performs with jazz and hip-hop musicians as a spoken-word artist, is definitely a writer to watch. Highly recommended for all public and academic libraries. Roger A. Berger, Everett Community Coll., WA
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Anchor (April 8, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400031591
• ISBN-13: 978-1400031597
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.5 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,269,656 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Adam Mansbach's most recent book, Go the F*ck to Sleep, is a #1 New York Times bestseller, and one of the most talked-about books of the decade. A viral sensation that shot to #1 on Amazon.com months before the book was even available, GTFTS has also topped bestseller lists in many of the other thirty-plus countries in which it's been published, and is forthcoming as a feature film from Fox 2000.

Mansbach's last novel, The End of the Jews, won the 2008 California Book Award and was long-listed for the IMPAC-Dublin Prize. His previous novel, Angry Black White Boy, was a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2005; it is taught at more than eighty universities and was adapted into a prize-winning stage play. He is also the author of the novel Shackling Water, the poetry collection genius b-boy cynics getting weeded in the garden of delights, and A Fictional History of the United States With Huge Chunks Missing, an anthology of original short stories which he co-edited with T Cooper.

An inaugural recipient of the Ford Foundation's Future Aesthetics Artist Grant, Mansbach is the 2009-2011 New Voices Professor of Fiction at Rutgers University. The founding editor of the pioneering 1990s hip hop journal Elementary, his fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Esquire, The Believer, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, N+1, Vibe, and JazzTimes, and been widely anthologized. Mansbach's forthcoming projects include a graphic novel, Nature of the Beast, forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in 2012, and a new novel, Rage is Back. He lives in Berkeley, California, and is a frequent lecturer on college campuses across the country.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Mannered Mansbach, March 13, 2002

By 

Radha Maldonado (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shackling Water (Hardcover)

This is jazz writing at its finest? Alive and kicking? If so, we need to kill it. Don't be bamboozled by the mostly silly, misleading "advance praise" on the back of this volume. Mansbach does not riff like Coltrane. He does not flow like B.I.G. In fact, Mansbach is just the kind of writer (or, more precisely, this is just the kind of book) we DON'T need. Shackling Water is a labored, spoken-wordy blend of pseudo-Baraka rhythms that boasts several failed attempts to emulate Paul Beatty's humor. The story itself is trite trite trite, a dull retelling of the old jazz-musician-addicted-to-heroin bit. Can we PLEASE get past this? Most of the characters are uninteresting (The protagonist is said jazz musician. Then there's the older white woman painter girlfriend of said jazz musician. The legendary jazz hero of said jazz musician. The cutely named but paper thin drug dealer. The homophobic piano player whose individual story seems to be a facile riff on Baldwin's classic "Sonny's Blues."), and one wonders if the author truly understands them. The book has an occasional pleasing sentence, but it is mannered beyond belief, the work of one who seems to be feverishly, desperately trying to write himself into a culture that he obviously has a lot of information about; but then again, facts do not constitute truth. Several scenes go beyond the bounds of believability. One post-coital scene finds the inter-racial lovers deconstructing race and the master-slave dialectic. Another ridiculous one has the protagonist playing his horn while the local dealer freestyles (wowing the white painter with a mention of Flannery O'Conner. Wow.). The protagonist and the local dealer (ingeniously named Spliff) also share a dull word or two about jazz and hip hop. Earnest? Forced? Long-winded? Yes. What a coincidence! It seems (based on relatively thin but compelling evidence) that the author himself struggles with these very qualities. On the recommendation of a professor friend, I had the, um, pleasure of attending a recent panel discussion on jazz and hip hop in the hallowed halls of Columbia University in which Mr. Mansbach was one of the participants. Q-Tip (aka Kamaal), Olu Dara, and several other (male) jazz musicians made up the rest of the panel. I say "panel," but, oh, if only it were actually that! The "panel" proper was actually a brief series of promising but ultimately unconnected comments of which Mr. Mansbach, in that spoken word tone and lilt I find so annoying, made many: both lengthy and self-indulgent. The "panel" then became even more of the Adam Mansbach show, with him reading from his work over live jazzy tunes. Ah, but here, perhaps, is a chance to praise Mr. Mansbach's book. You see, read pretentiously over jazzy tunes Shackling Water sounds great - well, better. With sixty percent of the actual prose obscured by jazzy noise, words like "soul" and "cascade" and "Latif" and "horn" sound cool! But outside of that context this book (and here I will now insert, loudly, according to Mansbach's writerly technique, the appropriate hip hop reference) gets the gas face. Is there any wonder that the author is book-touring with his band? In short, being Elvin Jones' roadie and an emcee and living in Fort Greene do not make one attuned to the pulse of a culture. Nor is this the stuff of a good writer. Whatever potential Mr. Mansbach has (and I do believe he has some, along with a fair deal of bravery and hustler's brio) will require him to interrogate more carefully his relationship to (black) cultures and (artistic, novelistic) traditions before it is fully realized.

5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hot, hot, hot, March 20, 2002

By 

James Reuben (New Jersey) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shackling Water (Hardcover)

Adam Mansbach's debut is luminous, this boy can write! So interesting to see that we are finally exploring the connection between jazz and hip-hip, which one can argue, are truly the only pure "American" forms of music.

Mansbach tackles these subjects well, making both of these worlds truly come alive as we follow Latif on his journey into manhood and into the world of NYC.

I wholeheartedly recommend this first-timers work and wholeheartedly disagree with the dissenter below. The problems and the beauties of the jazz and hip-hop world can not be brought to light by one novel alone......those who put that responsibility on one writers shoulders will always be disappointed. One writers view will always be a narrow view and I appreciate that Mansbach has opened the door for further discourse.

Bottom line: buy it, read it and look forward to more from Mr. Mansbach.

5 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A novel that sings, February 19, 2002

By 

Richard P. Carpenter (Danvers, MA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Shackling Water (Hardcover)

This stunning debut novel is a rocket ride fueled by the rhythms of jazz and hip-hop. But you don't have to know Coltrane from "Night Train" or hip-hop from doo-wop to appreciate the author's lyrical and powerful prose. The blurbs on the book jacket compare Adam Mansbach to everyone from Walt Whitman to James Baldwin; I would add the name of Jack Kerouac. Yet there is none of Kerouac's rambling or sloppiness in this tightly told tale of a black saxophonist who comes to New York to face the talent of his idol, the love of a white woman, the temptation of heroin, and most of all, himself. If a metaphor occasionally misfires or a page or two seems overabundantly introspective, that detracts little from the impact of a story that is both worth telling and well told.