Los Angeles' skid row, as Steve Lopez writes in "The Soloist," is the homeless capital of the nation.
Hidden in plain sight just down the street from City Hall and mere steps from the offices of this newspaper, skid row is a reeking repository of disease, drugs and desperation that most of us avoid when possible or hurriedly step past when necessary, averting our stares from hollow cheeks and hollow eyes, as if they were invisible.
"The Soloist" is Lopez's compelling and gruffly tender account of what can happen when you don't step past.
In his unsparing portrait of this universe and the plight of the homeless mentally ill, Lopez offers not a moment of wonkery or preachiness -- just his keen observations and eye for telling detail as he unfolds the story of his unintended and improbable friendship with a homeless, schizophrenic classical musician, Nathaniel Ayers.
Lopez, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, is an old-school news guy in the tradition of legendary columnists Mike Royko of Chicago and Jimmy Breslin of New York. This means he is no pundit but instead favors getting his butt out of the newsroom (you'd be surprised how rare that is) to dig up character-driven stories and, whenever possible, to poke a sharp stick in the eye of authority. Writing two to three consistently good columns a week is one of the hardest jobs in journalism, and Lopez is very good at it.
"The Soloist," his fourth book but first work of nonfiction, grew out of a series of columns he wrote about Ayers. I had some doubts that those fine columns I'd read would provide enough meat for a book, but he has fleshed out the story beautifully and engagingly. (I should note that, beyond sitting on a book festival panel with him once, I don't know Lopez.)
His involvement with the homeless middle-aged musician began when Lopez impulsively stopped to chat with Ayers after hearing him play some haunting refrains from Beethoven on a partly strung violin on a downtown Los Angeles street. Only semi-coherent, his possessions jammed into a shopping cart at his side, Ayers nevertheless cut a memorable figure, an "image of grubby refinement" that Lopez figured just might be worth a column.
A few more conversations and a little checking revealed that the man's unlikely story of being a former prodigy and student at the famed Julliard School in New York was true -- and Lopez had himself a nice human-interest story of a talent, a fall and promise unrealized. The headline: "He's Got the World on Two Strings."
