Summary
The Bear is a Kodiak bear who talks, reads, broods on mystical questions and plays the alto saxophone, and he is descended from circus bears. When the novel opens he and his friend Jones, who won him years before in a poker game, are scraping a living in New York with a degrading street act. Tired of the circus routine, the Bear starts sitting in at a jazz club with the saxophonist Arthur Blythe, and the musicians care more about how he plays than about what he is. Real players turn up as characters, among them Lester Bowie, Billy Hart, Charlie Haden and Ornette Coleman, and the Bear's head is full of Monk, Mingus, Parker, Coltrane and Sonny Rollins.
Success brings trouble. After an early gig he is shot at, arrested for lack of the right animal permits, locked up and experimented on, with scientists curious about his thumbs and his speech; in jail he argues philosophy with a psychiatrist. Friends from the jazz world join forces to spring him and take him to Woodstock to record an album and prepare for his first tour. Along the way he falls in love with Iris, a biologist, and his long friendship with Jones changes and strains. Through all of it he tries to stay out of the papers.
This is a long book, around 480 pages, and it takes its time. The best passages are about music, written from inside a solo by a writer who has played drums for decades, and the Bear's reading, Rumi and Shakespeare among it, runs all through the book. Publishers Weekly called it "hilarious" and "richly imagined," found in its humor "a shambling, cartoonish wit that recalls Pynchon at his most controlled," and thought the love affair the weakest part. Kirkus found it "bewilderingly brilliant, frequently frustrating, archly hip," with too many elliptical meditations. A. O. Scott, in Newsday, praised its "fluent, witty prose." It suits jazz listeners first, and readers who enjoy a comic novel willing to be serious about art and the spirit.
Historical Context & Significance
The Bear Comes Home won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1998, over Donald Antrim's The Hundred Brothers, Rilla Askew's The Mercy Seat, Mary Gaitskill's Because They Wanted To and Francisco Goldman's The Ordinary Seaman. It was Zabor's first novel; the same year Philip Roth took the Pulitzer for American Pastoral. W. W. Norton published it on July 21, 1997, nearly two decades after its first chapters ran in Musician magazine beginning in 1979.
Zabor was born Joel Zaborovsky in New York in 1946 and raised in Brooklyn. He is a jazz drummer, began writing about jazz for Musician in 1977 and later became one of its editors. The novel's germ, by his account, was the sight of a Gypsy and a bear leaving a mosque in Istanbul. His memoir, I, Wabenzi (2005), follows him from a Brooklyn childhood through the deaths of his parents to Turkey and a Sufi order in England. He received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 2008.
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