Book Review by Heather Anne McIntosh
I was very much looking forward to publication of Janet Fitch’s second novel, “Paint it Black.” Ms. Fitch’s first novel, “White Oleander,” is one of my favorite novels, and when I ordered her second novel, I didn’t bother to read one word of description or review. Buying this book was a no-brainer.
This novel begins in 1980 in Los Angeles and the main character is Josie Tyrell, a punk-rocker who spends her days doing nude modeling for studio art classes, and appearing in edgy student films, making barely enough money to support her drug habit. Her nights are spent at clubs and flavored with alcohol, pills and cigarettes. During the first hundred pages of the novel, Josie’s boyfriend disappeared saying he needed to get away and work on his art. Michael is a rich boy who is extremely well educated and well traveled, and he has connected with Jose in a way neither has experienced before. Their relationship is nurturing and complex but also dark and mysterious- full of art and literature and sex and drugs. Jose and Michael are deeply in love.
Soon we find out that Michael has committed suicide in a hotel room in 29 Palms, and this sets us up for the course of the book, a nauseating and claustrophobic reflection of grief and loss. When Josie attends Michael's funeral, a high-society affair arranged by Michael's famous concert pianist mother Meredith Loewy, Josie is physically attacked by Meredith, who seems to harbor a vendetta against her, screaming, "How dare you? Why are you alive? How can you be alive when he's dead?" Confused, Josie retreats to her small cottage apartment which she once shared with Michael, its walls covered with his murals. She wonders how this man she loved can be the same person who took his own life, and about the relationship he had with his mother. The novel continues in this reflective state until its tragic end, over four hundred pages later.
Ms. Fitch has a gifted way of describing her characters, and the strong point of this novel is a complex sense of the three main characters which are laid out for the reader and dissected, little by little until their every attribute has been examined from every angle many times. Michael is eulogized over and over by a grieving girlfriend and mother. In this breath-taking passage Josie remembers Michael: “She remembered everything, everything. How they carried they carried the last of the boxes down from the street and collapsed on the enormous couch that someone had managed to haul down there. Michael stretching out his lanky shoulders in his peculiar gesture, wedging his wrist behind the joint ad pressing the whole arm forward, first one and then the other, as he surveyed the box-filled room, the rough posts that held up the ceiling. Then he slipped his arm around her waist, pressing his head to hers. She loved that best, even more than fucking. She could feel it even now, the hardness of his head, the smell of his sweat, like a liquor, the way the view shimmered in the summer light, the long silvery eucalyptus leaves that blew across the window like a girl’s hair.” The way Josie describes Michael is spectacular – comparing his smell to liquor and the eucalyptus leaves to a girl’s hair. This is the kind of writing that takes a reader completely out of their own world and wholly into another – a world of such beauty and tragedy we are forced into a drug-like state and left wanting more.
The character of the mother, Meredith, is painted for us in a dazzling array of color and sound. Meredith begins as an unlikeable woman, cold, rich and hardened, who is filled with hatred directed at Meredith. Throughout the novel, the two women become involved emotionally in a dark and complex way, their shared love of Michael and propensity for wallowing in the darkness of the world brings them together and separates them repeatedly throughout the novel.
Art, music and literature are used throughout this novel to describe the characters and scenes. Meredith’s character can be seen through her relationship with music, as Josie aptly observes in this passage: “Meredith bent over her piano, playing gently. Even when she was drunk, you could tell Meredith was the real thing. Josie had heard recordings of her room-filling Liszt, the speed of her Chopin, the complicated brokenness of her Schoenberg. But she played the Brahms like thinking. Slow, hovering, considering then moving ahead, only to turn back and repeat itself. It was private, it reminded Josie of gondolas somehow, those long black boats, like the piano itself, nosing through heavy mists in narrow canals.” Again, the writing is stunning. Ms. Fitch uses metaphor to paint a picture over and over – playing Brahms like thinking, pianos like gondolas nosing through heavy mists.
This book reads like fine chocolate - layered, intense and with a flavor that changes from the first smell to the final swallow. It is incredibly pleasurable to read, yet it feels more like poetry than a novel. The one glaring weakness in this novel was, because of the enormous gifts of this writer, easy to overlook – the plot. The book wanders through over four hundred pages with very little action and repeats itself frequently. As a result, it’s possible that after the first few chapters many readers will tire of the story, even with the dazzling writing.
Normally, I would’ve read this book in a week or so – about the time it took me to get through “White Oleander.” Surprisingly - this novel took me three months to read, and I had to keep interrupting it with other books. Each read caused an overwhelming sense of sadness, which at times became overwhelming to me as a reader. Even so, I kept coming back to it, and each time I felt again immersed in the overwhelming beauty of the author's words and descriptions. Yet it was harder and harder to read about Michael and Meredith, the son and mother pair with their dark and intimate relationship. By the end I was happy to complete the final page. Now I look back upon this novel and realize it is a better read the second time, when the expectations for story and plot are lessened and one can concentrate fully on the spectacular gifts of this talented writer.
