Paint It Black: A Novel [Paperback]

Janet Fitch (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 3, 2007

"A dark, crooked beauty that fulfills all the promise of White Oleander and confirms that Janet Fitch is an artist of the very highest order."--Los Angeles Times Book Review

Josie Tyrell, art model, runaway, and denizen of LA's rock scene finds a chance at real love with Michael Faraday, a Harvard dropout and son of a renowned pianist. But when she receives a call from the coroner, asking her to identify her lover's body, her bright dreams all turn to black.

As Josie struggles to understand Michael's death and to hold onto the world they shared, she is both attracted to and repelled by his pianist mother, Meredith, who blames Josie for her son's torment. Soon the two women are drawn into a twisted relationship that reflects equal parts distrust and blind need.

With the luxurious prose and fever pitch intensity that are her hallmarks, Janet Fitch weaves a spellbinding tale of love, betrayal, and the possibility of transcendence.


"Lushly written, dramatically plotted. . . Fitch's Los Angeles is so real it breathes." -Atlantic Monthly


"There is nothing less than a stellar sentence in this novel. Fitch's emotional honesty recalls the work of Joyce Carol Oates, her strychnine sentences the prose of Paula Fox." -Cleveland Plain Dealer

"A page-turning psychodrama. . . . Fitch's prose penetrates the inner lives of [her characters] with immediacy and bite." -Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Fitch wonderfully captures the abrasive appeal of punk music, the bohemian, sometimes squalid lifestyle, the performers, the drugs, the alienation. This is crackling fresh stuff you don't read every day." -USA Today

"In dysfunctional family narratives, Fitch is to fiction what Eugene O'Neill is to drama." -Chicago Sun-Times

"Riveting. . . . An uncommonly accomplished page-turner." -Elle

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Following the huge success of White Oleander, where Janet Fitch portrayed the coming-of-age of Astrid, a young girl placed in foster care after her mother murders a former lover and goes to prison for life, she has once again created an indelible portrait of a young woman in Paint it Black. Josie Tyrell is a teenage runaway, an artist's model, and an habitué of the '80s LA punk rock scene. She is a white trash escapee from Bakersfield, having left a going nowhere life there. Now, sex, drugs and rock n' roll inform her days and nights. Paint it Black is the perfect title choice because Josie's lover is never coming back, as the song says.

Josie meets Michael Faraday, son of concert pianist Meredith Loewy and writer Calvin Faraday, long divorced. He is everything that she is not: refined, wealthy, well-traveled, brilliant by fits and starts. He is also a Harvard dropout, leaving school so he can paint; his new obsession. He refuses help from his mother, who is furious about his decision to leave school, but it doesn't bother him to have Josie working three jobs to support them. He is given to black moods, frozen in amber by his perfectionism, contemptuous of those who do not agree with him about art and life. Josie adores him. One day much like any other, he leaves their house, saying that he is going to his mother's so that he can paint in solitude. Instead, he goes to a motel in 29 Palms and shoots himself in the head.

What follows is days of watching Josie in a near fugue state from grief, drugs, booze, and going over and over her love for Michael, trying to grasp how he could do what he did. After all, didn't they share the "true world," Michael's characterization of their cocoon of love and exclusivity?

Meredith calls her and says, "Why are you alive? What is the excuse for Josie Tyrell? I ask you." Ultimately, they form a tenuous relationship, because all that is left of Michael lives in the two women. Josie even lives with Meredith for a while. When Meredith is ready to go on tour again, she asks Josie to go to Europe with her. Before she can do that, she must go to 29 Palms and try to understand, finally, why Michael's depression pushed him over the edge. That puzzle is not solved, nor can it be, but the end of the story is a hopeful, upbeat, new beginning. Janet Fitch has beaten the curse of the sophomore slump with this dynamite second novel. --Valerie Ryan --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Fitch follows her bestselling debut, White Oleander, by revisiting the insidious effects of a powerful, narcissistic mother on an only child. Michael Faraday is a Harvard dropout who paints in the L.A. art world of 1981; his suicide happens a few pages in, and sets the stage for a Fitch's masterful shifts in time and perspective. Josie Tyrell, an artist's model and denizen of the punk rock, had an intense relationship with Michael, but never managed to free him from his mother, renowned concert pianist Meredith Loewy, who moves in a bleak, loveless world of wealth and privilege. Yet their very different loves for Michael bring about a surprising alliance between the imperious Meredith and Josie, a white trash escapee whose inborn grace, style and sense of self sustain her—along with art, music and alcohol. The two find unexpected comfort in each other's shared loss, allowing Fitch to contrast the inner and outer resources of women whose lives couldn't be more different, and to flash back deeply into their histories. Fitch excels at painting a negative personality with sure-handed depth and fairness, and her prose penetrates the inner lives of the two with immediacy and bite. In Josie, she has created an indomitable young woman whose pluck and growing self-awareness beautifully offset Meredith's emptiness. Their relationship transforms a big cliché—the artist's suicide—into a page-turning psychodrama. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Back Bay Books (October 3, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9780316067140
• ISBN-13: 978-0316067140
• ASIN: 0316067148
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1.3 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (166 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #340,819 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.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 34 people found the following review helpful

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

By arb

Format: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.

17 of 19 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 VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

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 20 people found the following review helpful

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

By Josephine Lee

Format: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.