Ah, let's mull over the great protagonists of existential novels. Okay, there's Doestoevsky's guilt-ridden murderer Raskolnikov. And that disturbed scholar Roquentin in Sartre's Nausea . Also Binx Bolling, the troubled 'Moviegoer' in the Walker Percy novel of the same name. Let's not forget Joseph K., Zorba the Greek, Holden Caulfield, Dean Moriarty, the Underground Man…
Oh, yes, and that talking bear who plays the alto sax.
What's that you’re saying? You don’t think a talking bear deserves to be an existentialist hero?
You've gotta get with times. Trust me, the days of Smokey the Bear and Gentle Ben are long gone. Bears now have deep, angst-ridden inner lives, and need to worry about more things than preventing forest fires. They have to transcend the deceptive dualism of embodied life. They must tear the veil separating debased perception from cosmic enlightenment. Sometimes they even need to learn the chord changes to Charles Mingus’s "Reincarnation of a Lovebird . "
Okay, maybe not all bears, but at least one—the protagonist of Rafi Zabor's The Bear Comes Home . Who can blame him for his brooding bear nature. He doesn't even have a proper name, and just goes by 'The Bear'—that would be enough to give an identity crisis to even the most psychically integrated mammal. But our bear has other problems to deal with. He is the only talking bear in Manhattan, and is struggling to break into the jazz scene. Authorities want to capture him and administer more tests than a Kaplan SAT prep center. His record label is guilty of bear-baiting in the first degree. His girlfriend is embarrassed to be seen with him in public.
Can’t a talking bear get a break?
But a growing cadre of fans are fascinated by the novelty of an alto-playing animal, and friends and fellow musicians offer their support—if jazz players understand anything, it's the concept of the excluded minority facing hostility and discrimination. The bear's friend Jones tells him: "I wonder if the Indians in these parts had a myth about Participating Bear, the van-riding saxophonist of the American dream….The audience is just starting to latch on to you, you know. I sense a groundswell. I intuit recognitions….Jazz people, they're such outsiders you're the kind of mythology they can relate to. You're a dream figure, you're their hip little secret. I think they’re beginning to catch on."
But the validation the Bear most craves comes from fellow hornplayers. Fortunately Ornette Coleman shows up a gig and offers advice clothed in Delphic obscurities: "I think you play quadripedally, so what would a quadripedal tone be if you didn't transpose it to two-footed music…By the way, I wouldn’t worry about the audience leaving. They used to walk out on me all the time."
A host of other real-life jazz artists appear in this book—Lester Bowie, Charlie Haden and Billy Hart, among others—and lend a helping paw, from time to time, to our beleaguered hero. And though the star attraction in a novel of this sort must be, face it, the talking bear, Zabor also takes us on a rich fictional tour of the culture and exponents of modern jazz. Without a doubt, The Bear Goes Home ranks among the finest jazz fiction I've read, and belongs on any short list of the best music novels of recent decades.
Yet readers almost didn't get this gem. Parts of the novel first appeared in Musician magazine as far back as 1979, but author Rafi Zabor took a long hibernation, and the The Bear Comes Home didn't get completed and appear in book form until 1997. Perhaps the writer, like his hero, had his own existential issues to address. As a result, the novel that could have been an exciting debut of an up-and-cominh young talent didn't show up on the shelves until Zabor was in his fifties. Yet the work still demonstrated stunning talent, albeit no longer of the youthful sort, and the book beat out far better known competition—that same year saw the publication of Don DeLillo's Underworld , Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral —to win the 1998 PEN / Faulkner award.
In the many years since the release of The Bear Comes Home , Zabor has published very little, and to only modest acclaim—his only follow-up book is the now out-of-print memoir I, Wabenzi: A Souvenir . Even Zabor's exceptional debut novel seems to fallen off the radar screens of readers—a quick check of Amazon's sales rankings shows that it doesn't even rank among the top several hundred thousand sellers on that site. What a shame! This is the real deal: a deep, thought-provoking novel, with extravagant and sometime breathtaking prose, richly conceived characters, snazzy dialogue and vividly portrayed incidents. The brilliance here is often disguised—like the Bear himself, this book sometimes puts a comic mask, lumbering and indecisive, on its profundities. But make no mistake, this is no three-ring circus, despite the performing bear under the spotlight, and my opening gambit above on famous existential novels provides a more appropriate context for Zabor's work.
Before sending you off, let me pay my respects to a few of the more remarkable scenes. The bear's attempts to teach a songbird to perform a Thelonious Monk tune are both wise and witty by turns. The interludes focusing on the musicians' cut-rate tour of second-rate nightclubs captures a subculture slice of Americana life on the road that you didn’t get in Kerouac or Kesey. And after reading the pages dealing with the bear's time in captivity, you won't look at the city zoo the same way again.
But the best moments in The Bear Comes Home dig into the inner life of jazz musicians on the bandstand. This is the pièce de résistance, the reason why this novel is so unique and compelling. And Zabor saves his best for last. In the final pages of his novel, he presents a fifteen-page account of a single thirty-minute jazz solo (over the chord changes of a John Coltrane tune) and this pull-out-all-the-stops finale not only ranks among the best music writing, but represents some of most ambitious prose you will find anywhere.
When he finally puts down his horn, our existential bear comes out of his trance and wonders: "Was it any good? Did he really pull it off?" I can’t speak to the music, but as for the writing, the answer is a resounding 'yes'. What a shame that this talented novelist hasn't granted us an encore.
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature, and popular culture. His newest book is The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire .