Paint It Black: A Novel

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 400 pages
• Published by: Little, Brown and Company
• Edition: 1st Edition September 18, 2006
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0316182745
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0316182744
• Book Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Weighs: 1.4 pounds

Product 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 lady 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

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 lady whose pluck and growing self-awareness gorgeously offset Meredith's emptiness. Their relationship transforms a big cliché—the artist's suicide—into a page-turning psychodrama. (Sept.)
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Reader Reviews
Janet Fitch has a rare gift to take words and turn them into sentences that amaze and astound. She's an alchemist in the truest sense of the word: She transmutes the alphabet into mountains of pure, priceless gold. Forget the plot, you can just read a page and sit back and admire her gift for metaphor, prose and description. I have never read a book with such shimmering, unique, mouth-watering prose. I wanted to eat the book up, devour the story and digest it until it became a part of me. I wanted to melt it down and shoot it into my veins so it could linger in my heart and bloodstream forever. It's that kind of rare book. I marked countless passages for re-reading. I fell into the story and became Josie, almost literally. I wanted to move into her dark little house with the miniature circus and paintings on the peeling walls. That is an extraordinary gift: to create characters so real and profound, you escape reality when you're reading about them. I'd read and totally forget time and place. I'd disappear into the story and not want to return to my life. I hated to finish the book and cried when it was all said and done. The plot was excellent. Josie is a survivor and no one, not even the evil Meredith could bring her down... As I've said before, I don't do book reports, just state how I feel about books. This one is now in my top ten list of all time and will definitely NOT get loaned out....ever!! Comment | | (Report this)