Paint of Black [Paperback]

Janet Fitch (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 387 pages
• Publisher: Little; First Printing edition (2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316113239
• ISBN-13: 978-0316113236
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (155 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,066,299 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Janet Fitch was born and raised in Los Angeles, a third generation Angelino.
She attended Reed College in Portland Oregon, graduating with a degree in history, and attributes much of her storytelling ability to her training as an historian. Since then, she has worked as a proofreader, typesetter, graphic artist, newspaper editor, magazine editor, freelance journalist and teacher of creative writing--not to mention Manpower Temp and worst waitress in Los Angeles. If she spilled coffee on you, she apologizes.

Her second novel, Paint It Black, has just appeared in paperback and in Dutch, Italian, Swedish, German, Hebrew and Polish. Jennifer Jason Leigh performs the audiobook. Fitch's first novel, White Oleander was an Oprah Book Club selection, and was translated into 24 languages, including Mandarin, Turkish and Finnish. It served as the basis of a motion picture starring Michelle Pfeiffer, and the audiobook is read by Oprah Winfrey. Her early young adult novel, Kicks, sometimes surfaces. The anthology Los Angeles Noir (Akashic Noir) and Black Clock 7 both carry recent short stories.

Fitch currently teaches fiction writing at the University of Southern California Master of Professional Writing program. She regularly participates in the Squaw Valley Community of Writers summer workshops, and will be teaching at the 2008 Virgina Colony for the Arts' summer program in France. She lives in Los Angeles, in the hills where Rena Grushenka's girls picked trash in White Oleander.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing. Thought it would never end., April 5, 2007

By 

arb - See all my reviews

This review is from: Paint It Black: A Novel (Hardcover)

"White Oleander" is absolutely brilliant, one of my favorite books ever, so I was eager to read Janet Fitch's second novel. Unfortunately, "Paint it Black" doesn't hold half a stubby, burned-out candle to "White Oleander." I really wish I could say otherwise, because I loved Fitch's writing in her first book. Her second book just isn't, frankly, very good. I finally finished the turgid, endless thing yesterday and I'm so happy I don't have to read it any more.

Why does this book fail? My top three reasons:

1) There's almost no dialogue in the whole thing. And since they're so mute, the characters don't come to life at all.

2) I didn't care about any of the characters. At all.

And the thing is, characters don't have to be likeable for a reader to be invested in them. Fitch did a freakin' genius job of making evil Ingrid Magnusson of "White Oleaner" intriguing, attractive, even sympathetic in a twisted kind of way. Meredith Loewy of "Paint it Black," on the other hand, is a stick-figure Rich Bitch. Yawn.

Her son Michael, suicide victim, is supposed to have been oh so great: handsome, talented, erudite, smart, loveable. However, all of his actions show him to have been a snob, a pathological liar, and a whiny, overprivileged downer. Sure it's sad when anybody offs himself, but with this guy there ain't a lot to miss. It's hard to understand why Josie was in love with him in the first place.

And then there's our heroine Josie, who spends most of the book wandering around L.A. in a drunken stupor thinking the same thoughts over and over. This might be OK if it were a short story. As a novel it's unbearably boring.

3) Other reviewers have been spot-on when they've said the book is REPETITIVE. If I have to read "punked-out bleached hair," "voddy," "ciggie," "Smirny," "Blaise," "Jeanne" or "Montmarte" one more time in my life I am going to go insane. (Hmmm, maybe that's what drove Michael over the edge, too...)

The maddening repetition is more than just these cutesy slang words used ad nauseam, though. Fitch repeats phrases and sentences from earlier in the novel over and over, too. Now, it's a great thing in a novel to connect with earlier chapters and scenes and come to new revelations. But just quoting earlier passages verbatim but--italicizing them!--is lazy, lazy writing. Fitch can do better.

All in all, a very big letdown. I'd have given it one star, but I do believe Fitch is a good writer. Her second book unfortunately doesn't show her talent at all. It's really a shame that so few literary agents and publishing houses are willing to give first-time novelists a chance at being published, because so many writers seem to have only one good novel in them. I'm afraid Fitch may be one of them.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "With Flowers and My Love Both Never to Come Back", June 14, 2008

By 

D. West "Bones" (Boise, Idaho United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Paint It Black: A Novel (Paperback)

Paint it Black was a much-anticipated book after my love affair with White Oleander. I still believe in Janet Fitch's ability to weave a tale that is mesmerizing and her endings are perhaps, in my mind, her greatest strength. Although I was at least a 1/3 of the way through the novel before it really captured my soul; when it finally took root, I was a captive until the end.

There was a lot in this book including the language, the sexual escapades, the drugs and the squalor of the lifestyles that did not immediately appeal to me. There were even times I felt some of the language or sexual descriptions went over the top. But, on reflection, that's what this entire novel does. It goes over the top and allows us, the reader, to peer into the dark underbelly of a lifestyle we may never otherwise encounter or wish to encounter. It's dysfunctional characters ring with authenticity, the abrasive language is all too real, and the plot goes down like poison.

Again, Fitch has managed to construct a startlingly original tale with fresh characters that crackle with their own dysfunctions and humanity. Fitch has a very good handle on writing about young women and the mother figures in their lives, as well as the love interests who permeate her stories. This novel again touches on the unequal power struggle between two women. Meredith is older. rich and famous, while Josie is young and barely making it in the squalor of the punked-out underbelly of the 80s of LA. Both are in love with one man--Meredith's son Michael; both feel they alone know him, yet ultimately neither of them can save nor possess him. The more Josie learns about Michael after his death, the more she feels betrayed and confused. But instead of burying her confusion in something beautiful as Meredith does with her concert tour, (Beauty said there was something more than just one f____ thing after another." ) Josie allows time to rest for a moment and stop all that senseless motion and as she retraces Michael's last days she takes on his mantle, uncovers her own truth at Twentynine Palms and begins to live again.

Fitch proves herself a master manipulator as she gracefully twists the plot and characters in versatile ways that will keep you wondering what the ending will bring. It ultimately had me cheering as Josie chose the right path for herself, instead of taking the easy way out that may have tempted a lesser soul.

Fitch paints the tragedy of loss with such pain and sadness that you can literally feel what the characters must have endured, even if you can't picture yourself in the setting. How does Josie keep Michael alive--well she attempts to keep Michael alive by believing and rescuing someone else who is in a great deal of pain and she becomes for Wilma what Michael has been for her--a muse?? Perhaps.

It was hard for me not to compare this book to White Oleander, which remains one of my favorites, but this work definitely stands on its own and is worth the read. It is a finely structured story of madness and love, darkness and eccentricity, love and friendship, in an atypical LA setting that I've not seen much written about in quite this way. This book is dark, but it brings light. It's sad but it brings hope. It was definitely thought provoking and I would highly recommend it to readers.

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing sophomore novel, February 25, 2007

By 

Josephine Lee - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Paint It Black: A Novel (Hardcover)

Reading Janet Fitch's disappointing sophomore novel is much like reading a term paper written hours before its due date. The flowery prose, repetitive descriptions and excessive use of metaphors and similes do not mask the fact that the story is still empty, lacking substance or depth.

"Paint it Black" tells the story of 19-year-old protagonist, Josie Tyrell who deals with her live-in boyfriend Michael's suicide. Michael, a depressed artist, shoots himself in a hotel, leaving Josie behind. Josie develops a love-hate relationship with Michael's mother, Meredith, a famous pianist. The two women, despite their differences and marred past, find a common bond in being the only people who truly feel the void left at Michael's passing.

Like she demonstrated in her popular and critically acclaimed first novel, "White Oleander," Fitch is a talented, eloquent writer. Sentences like, "Her headache wound around her forehead, a crown of tequila thorns," are present all throughout the novel, painting a vivid picture. However, many of Fitch's descriptions, are repeated incessantly. Josie, the protagonist, is described as having "bleached hair" with "dark roots," wearing a "yellow, fake fur coat," driving a " rattly blue Falcon" and smoking her "Gauloise cigarettes." After the hundredth page, I was well aware of her appearance and habits and found further redundancies to be a way to fill space rather than examples of imaginative writing. Similar repetitive descriptions are given of Meredith and the house Josie and Michael shared.

Furthermore, the long, complex sentences do not mask the lack of plot and character development. What story-telling there is seems muddled, unclear and inconclusive. This is especially true with Meredith. Fitch attempted to create a mysterious and enigmatic woman whose true character was indecipherable to either Josie or myself. However, at the end of the book, Meredith's character seemed more unresolved and incomplete than intentionally cryptic and was very frustrating to me as a reader.

While Josie comes slightly more full circle, I still found her character resolution to be shallow. After enduring her perpetual mourning for the greater part of the novel, her coming to terms is too quick to be believable. Also, Josie's character did not strike a sympathetic note with me, especially when compared with Astrid, the compelling protagonist from Fitch's first novel. Josie's vulgar mouth, alcoholic tendencies and constant referral to vodka as "voddy" and cigarettes as "ciggies" left me annoyed rather than feeling compassion towards her.

The most developed character is, coincidentally, the one the reader never meets: Michael. Despite first being introduced as a stiff corpse, through memories, Michael comes across as Fitch's one complete character. Stuck in between the blue-blooded life of his mother and the bohemian, starving artists' world he shared with Josie, Michael chooses the ultimate out, leaving people, specifically the two women who loved and thought they knew him best, to pick up the pieces. Fitch achieves in accurately portraying Michael as internally tortured and yet provides the reader with a sufficient, thought-out resolution.

That same complete finality cannot be found at the end of the novel. The conclusion seemed harried and abrupt. When I turned the final page, I was surprised to see it was indeed the last one. Perhaps realizing her descriptive-laden story was like a meringue - fluffy and pleasing to the eye yet ultimately unfulfilling - Fitch brought up God, calling Him "just the man behind the curtain, working His cranks and levers," and Michael's previously unknown need for a Christ-like Savior in his increasingly desperate life. If present throughout the entire novel, these religious references could have made the book more meaningful. Instead, like that hastily finished term paper, they came across as a last-ditch effort to achieve legitimacy in an otherwise empty read.