The Power of Friendship (Book Review Sample)

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The Power of Friendship
The soloist is a true story of Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless man living under a tunnel in Los Angeles and Steve Lopez, a newspaper columnist for the Los Angeles times. Ayers has a rare musical talent. He got a scholarship to Julliard, a top music school but dropped out due to illness. One special thing about Ayers is that he is not only homeless, but also mentally unstable as he suffers from schizophrenia. Lopez first encounter with the musician is at the skid row, which is a dumping ground for inmates released from a nearby county jail, playing a tattered violin having only 2 strings. This is the beginning of their unusual friendship as Lopez starts writing his newspaper columns about Ayers, drawing much attention from the public. The friendship takes Lopez to Cleveland, where he interviews Ayers' relatives and former associates in high school and the Music School Settlement; to New York, to talk to former teachers at Juilliard and discover that the system in place there at the dawn of the racially charged 1970s wasn't helpful for a fragile black man; and to Las Vegas, where Ayers' father, also named Ayers, comes across as unforgivably remote. This treatise is a critical response to The Soloist by Steve Lopez.
Lopez introduces Ayers to the Lamp Community, a downtown charitable facility for the mentally-ill homeless individuals, hoping that by introducing Ayers to the Lamp Community, he might be able to entice Ayers to move off the streets and to take advantage of treatment opportunities for schizophrenia that had forced him to drop out of Juilliard and had plagued his life ever since. Ayers, however, is mistrustful of the medical establishment, and of people in general. With deep-seated paranoia, he is unreceptive to the idea of any intervention that would compromise his freedom and relegate him to self-imposed confinement, even temporarily, in what to him was a claustrophobic room with four walls. "I like it right here in the tunnels, where I can play all day long and nobody is going to bother me" (30; ch. 3). This quote shows how independent Ayers want to be from the rest of the world.
Lopez succeeds in his attempts to help Ayers from the streets and enable him to lead a more "productive" life. He secures a coveted apartment for him at Lamp, arranges for him to take music lessons with members of the Los Angeles Symphony, and contacts Ayers's sister in Atlanta. Ayers did make progress, eventually even consenting to move indoors into an environment that was safer than the squalid city sidewalks, but every step forward that he took was seemingly followed by two steps back. He continually reverts to periods of extreme paranoia and rage. Lopez becomes increasingly frustrated at the inconsistent results of his attempts to "save" his new friend and, in a very realistic examination of the situation, questioned his own motivations. Lopez considers the possibility that finding a permanent cure for Ayers's illness was unlikely.
Ayer has ups and downs. At first he comes to his new apartment at Lamp only to practice his music; then a couple of nights a week; then, all the time. He however continues to fight his inner demons-yelling at other residents, berates those who smoke, and criticizes the staff. But he is there. He is housed, stable and alive. The story offers two parallel journeys. On the one hand, we learn how Ayers began his life as a gifted musician, his admission to Juilliard, one of the toughest, most competitive music schools in the world, his breakdown and life on the streets. He embodies a frayed social fabric aggravated by the dispersal of the mentally ill into a greater, less caring society, and Skid Row is that society's true Ground Zero.
Ayers is humble and talented and makes for the perfect hero and he offers hope for all schizophrenics. On the other hand, this is a journey of self discovery for Lopez. By researching Ayers’s life and trying to help him, he learns about himself and human nature. He turns into an advocate for the homeless and really makes a statement that Skid Row in Los Angeles, and all other mental health asylums, needs attention. One particular quote that sums this up is f...