Renne's insecurity with women snuffs out the romance then he finds himself the lone holdout for a guilty- but-insane verdict and the object of his fellow-jurors' contempt.

Salzman skillfully interweaves flashbacks with the nurturing of Kyung-hee and the story of the trial and its offshoot, a budding romance between Renne and fellow-juror Maria-Teresa, an attractive married woman. He becomes deeply involved in teaching a new prodigy, Kyung-hee, a nine-year-old Korean-American, and he serves as a juror in the trial of a Zen student accused of murdering his master. When Salzman's story begins, Renne is 34, a cello teacher at UCLA, still a virgin, still grimly determined to concertize again. Then, tragedy: at 18, a conjectural hearing problem drove Renne from the concert stage. The ancient maestro, with his inspirational dignity, became the most important person in young Renne's life, softening its loneliness (no playmates, no girlfriends). After the war, his mother returned to Germany so he could study with world-famous cellist Johannes von Kempen, who had retired from the orchestra rather than endure false charges of Nazi sympathies. Cellist Reinhart (Renne) Sundheimer, the son of German Jews who fled to America, was once a child prodigy. Jury duty in a murder trial helps resolve a classical musician's deep professional crisis-in a haunting second novel from the author of The Laughing Sutra (1990) and Iron and Silk (1986), Salzman's acclaimed book (and later movie) about China.

The Soloist by Mark Salzman