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

This is an odyssey of how one man tried to recover the psychologically unrecoverable: The idyllic world of lower class black Cleveland for Nathaniel Ayers was forever shattered when his parents divorced. His descent into a mental world of confusion followed by music, followed by schizophrenia, was in truth just an unguided lifetime search for his lost father, and thus ultimately a defensive quest to return to the serenity of his shattered childhood. This beautifully penned book by Steve Lopez, Ayers friend and one of his many male mentors, proves that Humpty-Dumpty could not be put back together again. That is to say, that his shattered family circle could not be squared -- at least not within the parameters of the known range of human psychology. In a desperate life-long search for his father, who after the divorce moved to Las Vegas to become a garbage truck driver, Mr. Ayers bounced from one surrogate father to another until he managed to stumble upon his life calling: classical music. Through a desire to please, an intense commitment and discipline to music, Ayers became not just an average musician, but one hailed as a talented emerging world-class child prodigy. These attributes catapulted him into Julliard on a music scholarship in the same class and orchestra as the famous cellist Yo yo Ma. However, the pressures of the family breakup, Ayers own fragile mental makeup, and the steep competition at Juilliard took its toll and eventually proved too much for the tenuously held together psychological threads of Nathaniel Ayers. He had a complete mental breakdown, was carted off to Bellevue, forever cutting short prospects for a successful music career. Diagnosed as a full-fledged schizophrenic, Ayers was now broke but on his own, headed westward ever more desperately in search of his father, who like his mother, had by now remarried into families with stepchildren. Since, Nathaniel did not fit into either of the new family schemes, he drifted further westward still landing rock bottom on skid row in Los Angeles at the foot of the Beethoven statue, the last and ultimate of his surrogate fathers. The story begins when Ayers meets his guardian angel, the author, Steve Lopez, who knows a good story is staring him in the face when he sees a tattered homeless black man sensitively playing Mozart and Beethoven in the downtown LA subway tunnel. A shaky and tenuous friendship is struck in which Lopez takes Ayers on as a lifetime humanitarian project. Both men are immensely enriched by the friendship: Ayers in part recovers some of his missed dreams and gets pulled in off the streets; Lopez learns about classical music, about the horrors of America's embarrassing mental health situation, and more importantly, finds his own humanity and soul. Altogether this is a beautifully told story without the fakery of a normal American melodrama. I can't wait to see the movie. Five Stars

t starts as a newspaper story right out of a 1930s movie. Newspaper columnist hurries back to the office. On the way, he sees a middle-aged African-American man, in rags, playing Beethoven on a shabby violin. Could that be a story? A few weeks later, the journalist returns. This time he notices that the violin has only two strings. The violinist is philosophical about that. These things happen when you're broke, he says --- you get used to doing without, you play the best you can. And what about the names he's scrawled, with a rock, on the pavement? Oh. Those. My Juilliard classmates. Now Steve Lopez, ace columnist for the Los Angeles Times, has the makings of 800 great words. This is like a genius tumbling from Harvard to hobo --- how did Nathaniel Ayers get here? And then, of course, how will the attention that Lopez lavishes on Ayers, in his columns and in their conversations, turn his life around? That's the start of a decent book. But it's not this one. For after the first LA Times story produces a massive reader response --- including gifts of stringed instruments --- the idea of a "second chance" becomes important to Lopez and Ayers' newfound fans. After all, that's the American way. You go out there an unknown, you come back as American Idol. Cue the applause, spare us the complications. But at the center of this book is mental illness, which is, for Ayers, deep and seemingly intractable. He snapped at Juilliard, had treatment, then both fell between the cracks and wanted to --- he refuses therapy or medication, finding peace only in playing classical music near a statue of Beethoven. Steve Lopez walks into a swinging door when he befriends Nathaniel Ayers. Lopez has a wife and kids and a career that runs on adrenaline; to be with Ayers, he must surrender to the emotional and intellectual swings of a crazy person. Is Ayers getting better with attention? Will it change him to meet his Juilliard classmate, Yo-Yo Ma? And, at the bottom line, will he ever decide that thieves and government agents won't rip him off if he moves into an apartment?? Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr. are in the movie; no way would Tom Cruise volunteer for the role of Steve Lopez. Cruise apparently believes --- as does the father of Nathaniel Ayers --- that mental illness is a choice and that therapy and medication merely mask the problem. In these pages, Lopez finds himself dealing with a more complex reality: People as damaged as Nathaniel Ayers do better with care and therapy, and then they may well do worse. There's no straight line. And as for total healing, don't hold your breath. But something else is at play here, and as Lopez tells the story of an unlikely friendship, I came to see why readers fall in love with this book. It's something simple, and, as a result, extremely moving. It is the power simply of noticing another person, and caring, and continuing to care. "Relationship is primary," a doctor tells Lopez. "It is possible to cause seemin

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.

Six stars. A "there but for the grace of god"... book. Ordinary people can do extraordinary things. I used to play the bass, and I knew even knew Gary Karr. I love classical music. I kept finding myself wiping away tears of joy.

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