The Bear Comes Home

First published 1997

PEN/Faulkner 1998 · Winner

The hero of Rafi Zabor’s first novel is an alto saxophone virtuoso trying to evolve a personal style out of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman. He also happens to be a walking, talking, Shakespeare-and Blake-quoting bear whose keen sense of irony protects him from the double loneliness of the artist and animal in an underappreciative metropolis.

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The scion of a long line of European circus bears (and the product of an amazing roll of the genetic dice), the Bear, when we first meet him, is eking out a living doing a routinely humiliating street dancing art with his friend and keeper, Jones. But what the Bear is really best at – besides making himself cosmically miserable – is playing the alto with his world-calls set of chops.

One day he makes a bold foray from their apartment to jam with Arthur Blythe and Lester Bowie – real-life musicians rub elbows with fictional counterparts throughout the novel – at a New York club, thus beginning a musical and romantic odyssey. A nightclub bust followed by long dark nights of the soul in New York City’s dankest jail.