When I read Janet Fitch’s novel, White Oleander, during the summer, I devoured the book and savored its content. Fitch crafted characters with such depth and believability that I became an immediate fan of Fitch’s work. As a result, I had such high expectations for her follow-up effort, Paint it Black. While there are some elements of Paint it Black that shine, a sometime-sluggish narrative and characters without credibility overshadow what could have been stellar fiction.
“Her headache wound around her forehead, a crown of tequila thorns.” Paint it Black opens with tragedy. Josie Tyrell, a young woman living a “starving artist” lifestyle, has been worried about her lover, Michael Faraday, who has been out of reach for days. It is the 1980’s, it is Los Angeles, and it is a realm filled with artistic angst. At twenty, Josie has already experienced her share of hardships. She fled her stereotypical “white trash” roots at seventeen, landed in Los Angeles, abused drugs and her body. Michael, a Harvard dropout and unlikely lover for Josie, finds Josie’s world attractive and beautiful. Reciprocally, Josie discovers her own self-worth and softness in a life filled with hard edges. Or, so it seems. Josie learns that her life is forever altered because Michael has committed suicide in a seedy motel. Suddenly, Josie’s reality has transformed into a foreboding chimera.
Josie, with her bleached, choppy hairstyle, thrift-store clothing, and drug-induced hazes, is making her mark in Los Angeles’ art world. Modeling gigs and parts in independent films allow Josie to earn enough cash to by her “voddy” (vodka), drugs, and other paraphernalia. Michael discovers Josie through her modeling ventures, and the two quickly hit it off as Josie learns how Michael has abandoned his privileged, elite lifestyle behind. The lovers move in together and create an art-infused sanctuary safe from the gritty punk backdrop of LA. Michael’s paintings decorate the walls of the small home, and both characters seem to find solace in one another.
Michael’s personal demons can be traced back to his headstrong mother, Meredith. An accomplished and famous pianist, Meredith has a nearly unnatural grip on her son’s life. Michael’s liberation from his mother and Josie’s detachment from sleazy friends inspire their purposeful separation from the world. Unfortunately, their low-budget, thrift-store nirvana is not meant to last.
The novel follows Josie through her throes of depression and stages of grief as she tries to come to terms with his suicide. In retrospect, Michael’s behavior reveals troubling signs of disquiet and instability. Early in the novel, Josie and Meredith face off, as Meredith blames her son’s untimely death on Josie, Michael’s “unsuitable” partner. Meredith, with a cosmopolitan lifestyle and feeling accustomed to getting what she wants, is the antithesis of the struggling Josie. Yet both women self-medicate, both are artists, and both have lost the seeming nexus of their lives. Their unusual circumstances bring together two women who would normally not interact beyond withering stares.
“Why Didn’t He Tell Me?”
Meredith wonders, adding, “I should have known. How could I not have known? My own son.” For a novel that is loaded with language𤽨 pages of simile-laden prose—the story hinges upon secrets and things unsaid. It doesn’t take Josie long to discover that Michael had a way of bending the truth like light through a prism (hey, I can use similes too!)—everything emerges refracted and ultimately distorted. Realities in the novel are difficult to define because firstly, the narrator is unreliable (she spends much of the story wasted or hung over), and secondly, because the lies have scaffolded to a point where kernels of truth are ultimately revealed in Meredith’s old family photographs—and yet, the reader is left wondering, is THAT what this story is about? Is THAT why he killed himself? The climax of the novel, set in Michael’s hotel room, feels clich� and unfulfilling.
Themes of alienation and discord echo throughout the story. Josie resides in a thriving, darker element of society that hovers around the periphery of Meredith’s world. Fitch’s characters reveal the separate challenges they each have: Meredith’s caustic sarcasm displays the cracks in her cultured lifestyle, and Josie’s survival in an unwelcoming, often brutal landscape. Part of the problem with this novel, however, is that neither of the characters truly elicits the reader’s sympathy. Josie’s “deep” insights about life do not seem believable. Her reflections at her lover’s grave about roses left there looking “so perfect and dejected, just right for a dead boy” and how the flowers “surprised” her because they had the odor of “mulled wine” simply come off as false. When Josie notes, “What did it mean, that the two people she loved best in the world hated each other? It was the sides of herself, irreconcilable,” it is almost as if Fitch is posting a billboard to say “See how introspective my heroine is? See how she’s the shining jewel in the abyss?” A twenty year-old woman living in the sort of conditions Josie endures may absolutely have the wisdom of a bodhisattva, but it is a stretch of the imagination that a reader may not be able to take.
Overdose…of Figurative Language
The most distracting element in this story is not Josie’s drug use, Meredith’s caterwauling at her son’s funeral—it is the overuse of the simile! The glut of the metaphor! Josie’s examination of her world is bogged down by comparison after comparison. When Josie is an uninvited—then invited—guest in Meredith’s home, Josie listens to her faux mother-in-law playing the piano, and muses that Meredith could play the piano “as if a person could start over, and make slow and patient sense out of the world, that there could be order and safety, for all the sorrow in it.” One beautiful metaphor has poignancy. Innumerable comparisons disconnect the reader from the plot and the characters’ plight. Ironically, the artistic genius Meredith is the character who cuts to the core with lines like “Why are you alive? How can you be alive when he's dead?" Sometimes, simplicity has more impact than an intricately crafted narrative.
So, taking my own advice concerning brevity, my final point is that Paint it Black, the third and most recent novel by author Janet Fitch, is a work I highly anticipated reading after I completed her outstanding work White Oleander. Fitch’s narrative style is what makes White Oleander sparkle, and I hoped that her newest effort would offer the same resonance. In a few areas, the story echoes the beauty of White Oleander. In others, Paint it Black takes on its own gritty, philosophical edge that feels encumbered and unfolds at a snail’s pace.
From the bestselling author of White Oleander, a powerful story of passion, first love, and a young woman's search for a true world in the aftermath o...More at HotBookSale
From the bestselling author of White Oleander, a powerful story of passion, first love, and a young woman's search for a true world in the aftermath o...More at HotBookSale
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