Paint It Black: A Novel by Janet Fitch
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Book Reviews of Paint It Black: A Novel
Book Review: Paint It Black: A Short Review
Summary: 5 Stars
Paint It Black: A Short Review of Janet Fitch's Novel
Having read and enjoyed White Oleander by Janet Fitch I suspected that her novel, Paint It Black (Back Bay Books, Little, Brown & Company) would be a good read also. I was correct. I am reading slower than I used to. Perhaps it is the underlining and the marginal notes slowing me down, but I thoroughly enjoyed the novel. I've always loved stories about art, artists, musicians, and writers, and maybe that's why I was attracted to this story of Josie Tyrell, and the tragedies, loves, and nemeses of her life. The novel is rich in allusions, intense in conflict, and the author's prose and diction is rich. The novel is a portrait of Los Angeles and its bohemian rock music, film, and art scene. It is also a study of grief (over a suicide); of artists, creativity, and their quests for perfection; of dreams and dreamers; of the heavy hand of guilt; of beauty, love, loss, and sadness; and of how people live in and are supported by the music they listen to. Fitch has amazing and intense insights into the human psyche and heart.
I've tried to analyze why this novel affected me so deeply. Maybe it's because I've known nude models like Josie and writers, artists, and musicians like Michael. Perhaps it's because, like Michael, I am often haunted, and have my own personal demons, demons that refuse to be exorcised.
[...]She is a brilliant and insightful writer. Her writing deserves our attention.
Though there many more I could have selected, here are some of my favorite quotations from Paint it Black:''"Nobody ever really loved a lover. Because love was a private party, and nobody got on the guest list." (1)'"[E]ven lies could be true, if you knew how to listen." (27)'"She just kept talking, like a drunk arguing with ghosts . . ."(32)'"How right that the body changed over time, becoming a gallery of scars, a canvass of experience, a testament to life and one's capacity to endure it." (67)'"The stupid things you say in the rain, that can't ever be washed away." (81)'"Pen had no sense that someone might want to keep her private life private. Privacy wasn't even a concept. She'd never closed a bathroom door in her life." (83)'"Each man kills the thing he loves"--Oscar Wilde (This is repeated many times in the novel and has to be a theme).'"It was the way the world really ran, in little signs and signals." (160)'"Girls were born knowing how destructive the truth could be." (236)'"Sometimes things that happened were just too solid to move, like some huge bookcase or black breakfront that had dug its legs into the floor over the years." (272)'"That kind of tenderness couldn't be permitted to last. Nothing that beautiful could live long. It wasn't allowed. You only got a taste . . . then you paid for it the rest of your life. Like the guy chained to rock, who stole fire . . . You paid for every second of beauty you managed to steal." ( 278)'"You gave things away you couldn't afford to lose. Private things. You showed yourself and you couldn't take it back." (306)'"Insomnia and the hulls of dead dreams blowing across the floor of the empty rooms like dry leaves." (337)'"It was a mistake you could never recover from." (351)'"(Her soul) A moldy old scrap only fit throwing away, not even the devil would take it on consignment." (361)'(I love the desert, and I love this quotation Fitch has) "[S]he understood people who'd choose to live like that, isolated in a dry hard terrain, so far from comfort . . . Hard people, whose own company was even more than they could stomach." (378) And here: "[T]he Arabs invented zero, because they were a desert people, at home with absence. . . This was his landscape, bitter cold, populated only by rocks and strange leafless trees, no softness or mercy, no touch of green." (411)
Book Review: "With Flowers and My Love Both Never to Come Back"
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Book Review: Suicide May be Painless, but not for Those Left Behind
Summary: 5 Stars
Nineteen-year-old artist model, budget film actress Josie Tyrell is the kind of girl most mothers would blanch at if their sons brought them home. She's into drugs, booze and who knows what else, but she has heart. And she's in love with her live in lover Michael Faraday. However, as the book opens he's been gone for a week, John Lennon has just been shot by a desperate fan in New York, the radio stations are playing the heck out of "Double Fantasy," and Josie is beginning to think that a week sounds an awful lot like a separation.
Then she gets a phone call from the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office. Michael, son of a famous writer and even more famous concert pianist, has put a gun to his head and taken his own life in a seedy motel out in Twenty-Nine Palms. The news hits Josie hard. She has to go out to the desert and identify the body. Michael's mother Meredith calls and tells Josie she could have her killed. Josie fears a hit man even as she wallows in her grief.
This is a book about love, love lost. The pain of losing a lover, a child. Meredith is as much a part of the of story as is Josie and we see these two women grow and begin to accept and eventually depend on each other. But the most interesting character of the book is the Twenty-two-year-old Michael, the young artist who isn't there. We learn about him though Josie and Meredith, each remembering him differently. He had secrets from both of them, to each of them he was somebody else.
This is a book that I fell right into. Ms. Fitch has nailed the Seventies LA, punk, drug, rock culture. She's taken a character (Josie) who most would ignore and made her noble. She takes her readers into a subculture, makes them understand it as she contrasts it with the wealthy way Michael was brought up. This is a story you can read on many levels and it's one you won't soon forget.
Book Review: Not just a book, an experience
Summary: 5 Stars
I waited almost two years to read Paint it Black. I purposely waited because White Oleander had made such a huge impact on me. Not only was it one of the best books I have ever read, the quality of writing was so inspiring that I returned to my own writing soon after. I learned the beauty of metaphor reading that book.
But I knew it would not be fair to the author to compare the two. I wanted Paint it Black to stand on its own for me, to be a work separate. And so I waited.
I finished the book tonight and what I can tell you is that it is a book that grows, a story that starts tight and raveled and then unfolds; revealing a tender and raw place, and painful vulnerability - if one takes the time to look for it. If you've ever experienced firsthand the excruciating pain of losing someone to suicide you will understand Josie. You will understand the obsession over every single minute detail that must be examined, hashed and rehashed, thought about and analyzed again and again. Ms. Fitch takes the reader through the painful process, around and around and up and down, wrenching us through the tortured grief with Josie, inside of her, next to her, every step of the way. Until that moment, that chilling moment when she stands at the actual spot her loved one's last breath on this earth was expelled, that icy place where the blackness of death lurked and moved.
You must read this book. And when you do, remember you are entering a world that is very real, very raw, and be patient. This is the world of the 80's, the world of LA; allow yourself to be there, to smell it and hear it. Janet Fitch will paint the environment for you, relish it, let her draw you in and experience it all.
This is a book unto its own. It must be read separate from White Oleander. It is as different as black and white.
Book Review: great book, don't judge it from white oleander
Summary: 5 Stars
another wonderful bk by my favorite author, janet fitch.
so many people who liked white oleander judge this book harshly because it's not like it in plot - minus controling mother figure. but give it a chance.
the story of a struggling model living in the age of punk after her long-term artist boyfriend's suicide. it took me a school year to read b/c i have no time but any time that i was in need of advice, somehow i managed to find it in these pages. the life style of jossie is amazing. the book is slow but in a good way, it's a gentle read - not in content, just as in not alot happens. there is one scene, not a spoiler, where she's sitting in the car describing fruit and bean paste in the rain and i just sat down and said wow, they way she decribed that, i don't think most people could have noticed that detail without trying.
some people complain that it gets repetitive or whiney due to dead boyfriend but seriously? wouldn't you be whining and moping if your boyfriend commited suicide? and in the end, not spoiler, she digs things out of the past and comes out of the love-struck romantizing-dead-boyfriend and learns something.