Portrait of the artist as a young bear. He’s a jazz musician, an alto saxophonist of genius, with a rich inner life. The writing is without pretension and so far wholly chronological. Author Zabor has an astonishing ability not only to make jazz come alive on the page, but to catch his hero’s most transient angst in mellifluous sentences. The Bear’s inner voice, his self-loathing, runs deep and profound.
He becomes somewhat unhinged. He is falling, disintegrating when slammed in prison, for what are the authorities to do with an intelligent bear alto saxophonist? Right, hide him away. Behind bars his love of jazz feels gone, expunged. It’s a stirring yet sad interval. I understand many readers find the book funny. So far, I do not, which is not to say that the humor isn’t well handled here, but that on this first reading it’s the Bear’s musings that I find so deeply affecting. It is that frequency to which I am tuned.
Belay that, I just got my first laugh on page 122. The Bear has just asked the old Austrian doctor to help him break out of jail. The doctor demurs. Here’s the exchange:
"There is one eppel you did not eat, " said [Dr.] Friedman, casting an eye down upon a fold of brown army blanket. If you don’t mind, it vould freshen my breaths."
"By all means, " said the Bear, passing him the apple. "By all means cover up the inconvenient smell of internal rot, failed will, suspect sentiment."
This is one irritable if articulate bear. Later, sprung with élan by musicians and friends dressed as EMTs, he hides out at admirer Iris’ apartment in Peter Cooper Village where the atmosphere is charged with interspecies lust. His old pal, Jones, who won the Bear as a cub years ago in a card game, has arranged a top-flight recording contract. An earlier LP—the novel was published in 1997—has sold out overnight. The Bear’s going big-time. He’s given the chance to record with Jack DeJohnette and Charlie Haden. He composes several pieces and writes out the music for a quartet.
Problem is the Bear still feels estranged from his talent. The jailhouse has taken its toll. Unfortunately, for those around him—luckily for the reader—the ursine instrumentalist is of a most choleric temperament. You might say he’s bearish. Nothing can be easily done. Everything’s an imposition. This induces misery in Jones and everyone else except for the blissful musicians, who inhabit a realm of their own. During the recording session he’s so out of touch with his mojo that he can only perform by way of a conscious imitation of himself. Eventually things swing again.
Here the writing becomes striking. The prose becomes so descriptive about music that in the mind’s ear one can almost hear it. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever read before. And then there’s the sex. Interspecies sex between woman and bear that is anything but bestial. It’s such a peculiar interlude, so new, that I found myself not at all bored as I so often am by human fictional schtuppings. Especially well told is the sense of lover Iris’s fragility. It’s ambiguous, but if I’m reading it right, there seems to be something of a history of taboo-breaking with her. In that sense then she’s the perfect—if rather neurotic—match for the Bear. But it doesn’t bode well for the future, does it? When she arrives at the Bear’s bed she is described as wearing a "winding sheet." Uh-oh!
The jazz, much of the stuff the novel revels in, was already classic when the book was published in 1997.(Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk etc.) The jazz argot comes across as dated, too, so Zabor’s careful not to overdo it. The book may read better once the period in which it has been set is beyond living memory. Who knows, it may become a Don Quixote of its time. I certainly think the Bear has that kind of iconic potential. The novel really sings. For example, there are so many, the sequence in which Jones meets Mr. Big in the midtown offices of Megaton Records is astonishing. The details are pitch perfect.
But here comes the cognitive dissonance. The Bear is fully imbued with the thoughts and impulses of a human, yet he is a bear. This duality smacks the reader upside the head a bit when he or she comes to passages like this one on p. 257. The downstairs tenant, a photographer—the Bear’s living upstate with Iris now, closer to nature—shows up "in the early evening with two teenage girls who looked like they might fancy being models."
The Bear found it morally offensive and knew that it could lead to trouble – outraged parents, charges of statutory rape, police. He wasn’t about to barge in there, but he made a mental note to have a serious talk with the man the next time he found him alone.
Now, it would be impossible for the Bear, given what we know of his socialization, to think those thoughts. Fact, it is said, is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to be plausible. Well, here author Zabor breaks that rule, just tosses it out. It is impossible for the reader in this case to lend plausibility to the scenario. Just like that the writer has mucked with the fabric of the novel’s believability. Yet we read on, why? Somehow it happens. Very confounding. .