Berkley Books, 289 pp., $15

At 20, he played at New York City’s Lincoln Center.

At 21, he found himself at the psychiatric emergency room of Bellevue Hospital, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

“The pain was never greater than when you heard another student playing better than you thought possible. No matter how good you were, someone was better.” 

Here lies the psyche of a Juilliard student stressed out enough without the compounding factor of being black in a sea of over-privileged white students during the Civil Rights era, attending the most prestigious music conservatory school in the country on borrowed scholarship money requiring the maintenance of an A-B average.

But it’s the gift — the ability to pick up any instrument with the grace of a
well-seasoned musician — coupled with the possibility of becoming the next Beethoven, the next Mozart, Brahms or Dvorak, which drove the promising Nathaniel Ayers to the Juilliard School of Music. It also drove him to an inevitable mental breakdown.

We meet a much-older Nathaniel on a busy downtown Los Angeles street corner serenading passers-by. The aged musician catches the eye of LA Times columnist Steve Lopez with his above-par rendition of Beethoven and shopping cart filled with remnants of his life — buckets and instruments, ragged and soiled clothing and drum sticks (to fend off rats while sleeping on the street at night).

Ayers lives on Skid Row, the notoriously dangerous LA strip home to rampant drug addiction, prostitution, mental illness, violence and every sad story in between.

The Soloist documents the relationship between the writer and the ex-Juilliard student via Lopez’s weekly newspaper columns. Through these meetings, we begin to see first-hand the issues of mental illness in America and the lack of coverage and medical attention for those who suffer. All too often, the mentally ill fall through the cracks in the health system, forcing them to live alone in little worlds full of big paranoia.

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