Customer Reviews

Shackling Water

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Mansbach has his finger on the pulse of so much here: jazz, hip hop, race, urban life. Laitf, the protagonist, is the kind of character who stays with you long after you finish reading. Even the minor characters are memorable, and the writing itself is beyond compare. Mansbach is really defining new territory here: this is writing that truly comes alive, that comments profoundly on the struggle of a young man in language all its own. I read this book in one sitting, without planning to.