'Paint It Black' is a compelling tale of suicide, memory, and perception
At the heart of Janet Fitch's new novel, ``Paint It Black," is a strange little trio of characters. One is dead, and another, his celebrity mother, is basically a cipher; though she's described at length, we get little insight into who she really is and why she behaves the way she does. The third, and the one most likely to be called a protagonist, is Josie Tyrell , a teenage runaway from a poor, dysfunctional family now working as an artist's model and occasional actress. Josie is vividly drawn, but she's inherently rather unlikable. Not the most promising cast of characters. However, Fitch, author of the best-selling ``White Oleander ," still manages to craft a novel that is surprisingly compelling, suspenseful, and occasionally powerful as it unfolds amid the colorful chaos of the 1980s Los Angeles punk rock scene.
``Paint It Black" takes a while to get going. For the first third of the book, 20--year-old Josie grapples with the suicide of her boyfriend, Michael Faraday . A talented artist, Harvard dropout, and the privileged son of a charismatic and controlling mother, famous pianist Meredith Loewy , Michael introduces Josie to an imaginative, sophisticated world well beyond her humble upbringing. Yet he fails in his own personal, spiritual quest to find some sense of inner peace and abandons their shared apartment for a seedy motel room in the desert, where he kills himself, plunging Josie into a chasm of despair.
Fitch beautifully captures the sense of anger and dislocation caused by the death of someone close, the telling details, the disconnect with daily life. ``Michael was dead. And there was this china. And a small vase full of tiny flowers. . . . How could there be something so beautiful when he was dead." But it's tough going, as Josie flings herself into a flurry of self-destructive behavior fueled by drugs and alcohol. Instead of offering insight or reflection, the novel at this point is mostly a long, often tedious chronicle of someone falling apart while attempting, in her own way, to just keep going. ``Whenever she thought she could not feel more alone, the universe peeled back another layer of darkness."
But ``Paint It Black" gets more intriguing when Josie begins to develop a tentative relationship with Michael's mother. After trying to strangle Josie at Michael's funeral, accusing her of causing his unhappiness, Meredith realizes Josie was the only other person who really knew her son, and the two tentatively begin to talk. ``You're the last piece of him left," Meredith claims.
As Meredith recounts tales from Michael's childhood and his troubled family, Josie begins to question how well she actually knew her taciturn boyfriend, a young man whose great charm and warmth belied an underlying self-doubt and paranoia. Josie suspects a shameful family secret and becomes ravenous for details of Michael's life before they met, even as she feels guilty at betraying the truth she knows. ``How furious Michael would be if he knew she had come here. Spying on him. Letting Meredith tell her version of his life. Alternatives to old favorites. Tearing at the fabric of his image in her mind."
There is an unspoken competition in their recollections. Who knew him best, loved him best? Josie is never quite sure how much to trust Meredith. Are they truly bound together through their shared loss, or is the brilliant, manipulative Meredith setting her up, still holding on to some sense of vengeance? Their time together has a suspenseful, slightly surreal quality as they poke and prod through their remembrances. ``Every day there was something new. As if one death was not enough, it spread out, a feast of loss with ever more courses, surprising and painful in ways you could never anticipate."
As ``Paint It Black" bounds back and forth in time, the book is quite uneven in tone. Though not written in first person, the story is told from Josie's point of view, and when she rattles on using vulgar language and annoying slang like ``ciggies" and ``voddy," the character can be infuriating. Then Fitch whips out a stunning metaphor that can take the breath away. Some of the best writing is in the last few chapters, a deft blend of suspenseful on-the-road storytelling, dramatic revelation, and sharp psychological insight. The ending manages to tie everything together without closing the door on what really happened and what just might happen next.
