The Soloist: A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music (Hardcover)

by Steve Lopez (Author) "I can't get the image out of my head, this odd picture of grubby refinement..." (more)
Key Phrases: dairy crate, new cello, Skid Row, Los Angeles, Disney Hall (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Scurrying back to his office one day, Lopez, a columnist for the L.A. Times, is stopped short by the ethereal strains of a violin. Searching for the sound, he spots a homeless man coaxing those beautiful sounds from a battered two-string violin. When the man finishes, Lopez compliments him briefly and rushes off to write about his newfound subject, Nathaniel Ayers, the homeless violinist. Over the next few days, Lopez discovers that Nathaniel was once a promising classical bass student at Juilliard, but that various pressures—including being one of a few African-American students and mounting schizophrenia—caused him to drop out. Enlisting the help of doctors, mental health professionals and professional musicians, Lopez attempts to help Nathaniel move off Skid Row, regain his dignity, develop his musical talent and free himself of the demons induced by the schizophrenia (at one point, Lopez arranges to have Ayers take cello lessons with a cellist from the L.A. Symphony). Throughout, Lopez endures disappointments and setbacks with Nathaniel's case, questions his own motives for helping his friend and acknowledges that Nathaniel has taught him about courage and humanity. With self-effacing humor, fast-paced yet elegant prose and unsparing honesty, Lopez tells an inspiring story of heartbreak and hope. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Daniel J. Levitin

In 1980 I entered the Berklee College of Music, a fiercely competitive and, I soon discovered, disorienting program for musicians. The disorienting part was this: Although I had been the best saxophone player in my high school, I was barely average in music school.

On the commute home every evening I found no consolation. In every doorway, tunnel and subway station in Boston, there were great musicians: Even the bums were virtuosi. As Steve Lopez wryly observes in The Soloist, in music there is always someone better than you, someone with more time to practice, more willing to do without a meal, an extra hour of sleep, even a bed if that will get him closer to his dreams.

Lopez, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, first happened upon Nathaniel Ayers "dressed in rags on a busy downtown street corner, playing Beethoven on a battered violin that looks like it's been pulled from a dumpster." The guy sounded "pretty good." Later Lopez found out that Ayers had been a classmate of cellist Yo-Yo Ma at Julliard in the 1970s until he suffered a schizophrenic breakdown. Forced to leave school, Ayers ended up performing on Skid Row in Los Angeles, all but oblivious to the surrounding muggers, drug addicts, prostitutes and sewer rats.

The Soloist begins as "the tale of a man, stunned by a blow thirty years earlier, who carries on with courage and dignity, spirit intact." But it delivers far more as we follow Lopez's attempts to help Ayers bring a modicum of discipline to his life and music. Several readers of Lopez's column send musical instruments for Ayers, but Lopez becomes haunted by the idea that he may be doing the musician more harm than good, that the new bounty will increase the chances of his getting mugged or beaten to death. Lopez struggles with questions of how much autonomy should be accorded the mentally ill. To be sure, Ayers doesn't handle his life the way Lopez would (or wants him to), but the issue keeps coming up: To what extent does one individual have the right to try to influence another? When we try to help someone "for their own good," do we really know better than they what will ultimately make them happy?

Lopez arranges for a room in a nearby shelter to be designated as a de facto instrument locker, so that Ayers doesn't have to lug everything around in an easy-to-rob shopping cart. He tries to get Ayers into therapy and to spend at least one night a week in a homeless shelter. Ayers's own suspicions (some of them well-justified) and fierce independence thwart attempts to "mainstream" him. Lopez arranges for Ayers's estranged sister to visit from another state. The reunion is not without disappointment for all concerned. Each small victory toward bringing the homeless genius closer to normalcy is met with a backlash or a downward slide, paranoia and gratitude living in an uneasy alternation. Lopez hangs on, driven by the conviction that one more kind word, one more small intervention, will finally snap Ayers back into the real world.

Lopez is a natural storyteller, giving us a close-up view of the improbable intersection of musicianship, schizophrenia, homelessness and dignity. The result is a surprisingly lively page-turner, propelled by the close friendship developing between these two men and filled with eloquent passages: "Nathaniel isn't alone. Music is an anchor, a connection to great artists, to history and to himself. His head is filled with mixed signals, a frightening jumble of fractured meaning, but in music there is balance and permanence."

Scientists are just beginning to discover how music heals, through its boosting of immunoglobulin (IgA) levels and regulation of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Although this is not Lopez's focus, he beautifully conveys the effect that music can have on the battered soul of a true musician, a soul fighting to be heard through the din of dementia that crowds out the most perfect of human languages. Ayers, Lopez writes, "tucks the violin under his chin, blocks out the roar of traffic and leaves the known world. He scratches around a bit, chasing after ideas that aren't quite coming together, but then, as always, he finds a passage that works like a drug and the music pushes him free of all distraction. Eyes closed, head tilted to the heavens, he's gone."

The connection between the comfortable middle-class writer and the Skid Row musician is one of mutual respect and, to some extent, healthy suspicion. A new theory on the durability of music in our species helps explain their relationship: Called the honest signal hypothesis, it argues that music is a form of pure emotional expression and that it exists because it is a more honest signal than speech. In other words, it is more difficult to fake sincerity in music than in language. Lopez writes that he deals "too often with people who are programmed, or have an agenda, or guard their feelings. Nathaniel is a man unmasked, his life a public display. We connect in part because there is nothing false about him." Perhaps the reason there is nothing false about Nathaniel is that his mind, his heart, his life are music.

Nathaniel's honest signal ends up touching all who hear him play, culminating in a much anticipated and beautifully rendered meeting with Yo-Yo Ma, his famous Julliard classmate. The Soloist goes a long way toward explaining the workings of the musical mind, albeit one tragically touched by madness. It doesn't shy away from exploring the failures of governmental programs and mental health services for the needy, but it does so without preaching and finger-pointing. It doesn't editorialize; like good music, it just is.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Putnam Adult; 1ST edition (April 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399155066
• ISBN-13: 978-0399155062
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (82 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #117,217 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

91 of 94 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A profoundly moving read, April 24, 2008

By	Robert Busko (Waynesville, NC USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Let me say up front that I normally avoid books like the Soloist. When I picked it up, however, and started glancing through it I became hooked and couldn't really put it down. Is it a page turner? Not really. For me I became entangled with Steve Lopez, the author, and Nathaniel Ayers the focus of the book and simply had to see how the book ended.

Steve Lopez, a reporter for the LA Times, accidently hears violin music coming, apparently from nowhere. When he investigates he finds Nathaniel, an obviously down and out and homeless individual playing what is essentially a broken instrument. Intrigued, Steve Lopez becomes wrapped up in a mission to lift Nathaniel out of his obvious difficulties. Steve learns that Nathaniel was a former Juilliard student and a gifted musician. He was also suffering from mental illness (schizophrenia) leaving him basically disfunctional.

Throughout The Soloist the reader rides heavy seas with highs full of hope and then lows filled with disappointment and dispare. Through Nathaniel's story we see the value of the human spirit. Through the actions of Steve Lopez we see that a simple act of kindness and humanity is never wasted, regardless of our motives.

Steve Lopez is a wonderful writer and his story is worth your time to read.

57 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beethoven in Pershing Park, April 30, 2008

By	Kerry Walters (Lewisburg, PA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

In a neglected corner of L.A.'s Pershing Park stands a statue of Beethoven, hat and cane clasped behind his back. The minute Nathaniel Anthony Ayers laid eyes on it, he knew he'd landed in the right city. Los Angeles. The City of Beethoven.

Ayers, in his mid-50s, is a Julliard-trained bass player whose future as a musician crashed and burned when he suffered a psychotic breakdown midway through his studies in the early 1970s. The crack-up was probably prompted by the intensely competitive Julliard atmosphere, but also by the stressful fact that Ayers was a black student on a nearly all-white campus. His professors thought him brilliant. But with the onset of mental illness (later diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia), Ayers dropped out of sight. Years later, he wound up in Los Angeles, discovered the statue of Beethoven (his musical hero), and settled down to a life in the streets where he serenaded passing traffic on a battered, two-stringed violin. Music was the abiding passion that kept him grounded. Music was the catalyst that brought beauty and peace to his frequently confused and always fragile world.

One day Steve Lopez, columnist for the "L.A. Times" and an engaging, insightful author, heard Ayers playing. Sensing a column topic, he struck up an acquaintance. The acquaintance unexpectedly blossomed into a friendship, and The Soloist is the story of that friendship. Lopez's sensitive memoir spotlights the disorientation of schizophrenia, the perils of living on the streets, and the difficulty in achieving recovery. But in telling Ayers' story, Lopez also reminds us that the mentally ill and the homeless possess dignity, a fierce need for autonomy, and a hunger for meaning and beauty in their lives. In the process, Lopez also has some telling things to say about the scandalous fact that most major U.S. cities contain Skid Rows in which the most vulnerable of our citizens are segregated; some much-needed observations, given our pharmaceutical-crazy, quick-cure ethos, about patience, respect, and compassion when it comes to therapy (his mentor in this regard is Dr. Mark Ragins, a genuine pioneer in recovery therapy); and some extraordinarily important things to say about the redemptive power of music.

Lopez's memoir of his friendship with Ayers never falls into a feel-good sentimentality. Ayers may heal to a certain extent, but it's unlikely that he'll ever recover and he certainly has his bad, disoriented, full-of-rage days. As Lopez learned, progress in treating mental illness is never linear. But Ayers now lives in an apartment instead of on the street; he's happily making music on a variety of instruments in his own studio; and he knows that he's loved. Lopez, in turn, confesses that he frequently felt burdened, helpless, frustrated, and on one occasion when Ayers melted down, betrayed. But he also discovered that his friendship with Ayers enriched him: "I know that through [Ayers'] courage and humility and faith in the power of art--through his very ability to find happiness and purpose--he has awakened something in me...it's not a stretch to say that this man I hoped to save has done as much for me as I have for him" (p. 268).

A magnificent story about two really quite extraordinary men. Highly, unreservedly, recommended.

38 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Inspirational story -- showing the power of friendship and music, May 8, 2008

By	Joseph M. Russo (Weston, CT USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

My name is Joseph Russo -- I am one of Nathaniel's Juilliard friends mentioned in this book. I believe this book should be a "must read" for anyone who would like to more fully understand (and be affected by) the power of music and the importance of friendship....as well as the meaning of happiness and joy. It is a wonderful and ongoing story...Steve Lopez is an excellent writer befriending my dear friend Nathaniel who is a kind and wonderful person and extremely talented musician. You may want to read this book before you see the movie -- due out later this year.