Books |
The Soloist
Steve Lopez
By
Published: Jan 01, 2008
Category:
Biography
It 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 seemingly biochemical changes through human emotional involvement. You literally have changed his chemistry by being his friend.”
That cuts both ways; “The Soloist” is also the story of the biochemical changes that friendship with Nathaniel Ayers forge in Steve Lopez. If you are open to this book, you may find yourself veering off your own well-traveled brain pathways into fresh territory. That’s a big dividend from 270 pages you can read in an evening.
To read an interview with Steve Lopez, click here.
