Steve Lopez's book about Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, a black musician and paranoid schizophrenic, makes you want to dust off your dreams and scrub the world clean.

Not only does it affirm one's faith in journalism, it also ties Ayers' condition, individual and chemical though it may be, to poverty and race.

		"THE SOLOIST" By Steve Lopez Putnam ($25.95)

A columnist for the Los Angeles Times, Lopez discovered Ayers playing violin in a Los Angeles tunnel, wrote a gang of stories about him and shamed Los Angeles Mayor Anthony Villagairosa into promising millions for downtown cleanup.

Ayers is a native of Cleveland in his mid-50s with considerable musical talent. He spent a few years at the Juilliard School studying the bass, where his teachers recognized his soulfulness and "feel," but he dropped out when his illness took over.

He wound up on Los Angeles' Skid Row, a scary area indeed. Lopez first glimpses him in Pershing Square where there's a statue of Beethoven, one of Ayers' idols. Lopez can't get Ayers' image out of his head.

So like the good journalist he is, he begins to investigate. And irrevocably lose his objectivity.

As Lopez slowly gains Ayers' confidence, he burrows into that heart of darkness we've come to recognize as the failure of public policy. He finds allies, in the National Mental Health Association of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Lopez also bonds with Nathaniel's big sister, Jennifer, who becomes her brother's conservator; he can't believe the callousness of their father, who left the family when his son was a kid; and he discovers a new way of seeing from Nathaniel, who, he says in the final words of the book, "lives in his own world, and was kind enough to let me in."

If "The Soloist" seems nearly as much about Lopez as about Ayers, it's Ayers' world that demands our attention. Demons occupy his head; he assembles random information into the kinds of pictures he wants to see; he reveres Beethoven, is in awe of fellow Juilliard student Yo-Yo Ma, and is, to put it mildly, obsessive about drug dealers and smokers, types he doesn't want anywhere near him.

"Music is a meditation, a reverie, a respite from madness," Lopez writes of Ayers. "It is his way to be alone without fear."

Subtitled "A Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Powers of Music," the book chronicles the ups and downs of a bond that takes one step forward, two steps back.

Finally, with the help of Lamp Community, an extraordinary nonprofit agency that helps the mentally ill of Los Angeles, Ayers moves into his own apartment.

No longer does the freedom of the street (never mind its dangers) afford him his only dignity. No longer need he live without boundaries or responsibilities.

The book is full of heart-breaking scenes that are easy to sentimentalize, like the time Los Angeles Philharmonic cellist Pete Snyder offers Ayers free lessons or when Ayers and Lopez make up after Ayers explodes at the writer for arranging his conservatorship.

But it also covers terrain that is hard to sugarcoat, let alone repair, like the outhouses where Skid Row prostitutes do their tricks -- and keep house.

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 "star 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 Nathaniel, comes across as unforgivably remote.

If Ayers embodies a frayed social fabric aggravated by the dispersal of the mentally ill into a greater, less caring society, Skid Row is that society's true Ground Zero. Early in their relationship, Lopez spends the night there in Ayers' company:

"I'm angry about billions spent in Iraq while bomb-rattled vets live like animals on Skid Row. I'm ashamed that in a region of unprecedented wealth, the destitute and the sick have been shoved into this human corral. I'm frustrated by my inability to do more for Nathaniel. If I can't help him, how can I help any of the others?"

Lopez is helping by writing this book, now being made into a $50-million movie starring Jamie Foxx as Ayers, Robert Downey Jr. as Lopez. He's helping by raising consciousness about mental illness, race and poverty, issues clearly trying for Lopez.

As is Ayers' volatility. At one point, an exasperated Lopez turns to psychiatrist Mark Ragins, an authority on mental illness and the author of "A Road to Recovery."

"Relationship is primary," Ragins says. "It is possible to cause seemingly biochemical changes through human emotional involvement. You literally have changed his [Ayers'] chemistry by being his friend."