Paint It Black
A Novel
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4.0 • 72 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Josie Tyrell, art model, runaway, and denizen of LA's rock scene finds a chance at real love with Michael Faraday, a Harvard dropout and son of a renowned pianist. But when she receives a call from the coroner, asking her to identify her lover's body, her bright dreams all turn to black.
As Josie struggles to understand Michael's death and to hold onto the world they shared, she is both attracted to and repelled by his pianist mother, Meredith, who blames Josie for her son's torment. Soon the two women are drawn into a twisted relationship that reflects equal parts distrust and blind need. With the luxurious prose and fever pitch intensity that are her hallmarks, Janet Fitch weaves a spellbinding tale of love, betrayal, and the possibility of transcendence.
"A dark, crooked beauty that fulfills all the promise of White Oleander and confirms that Janet Fitch is an artist of the very highest order."-Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Lushly written, dramatically plotted. . . Fitch's Los Angeles is so real it breathes."-Atlantic Monthly
"There is nothing less than a stellar sentence in this novel. Fitch's emotional honesty recalls the work of Joyce Carol Oates, her strychnine sentences the prose of Paula Fox."-Cleveland Plain Dealer
"A page-turning psychodrama. . . . Fitch's prose penetrates the inner lives of [her characters] with immediacy and bite."-Publishers Weekly
"Fitch wonderfully captures the abrasive appeal of punk music, the bohemian, sometimes squalid lifestyle, the performers, the drugs, the alienation. This is crackling fresh stuff you don't read every day."-USA Today
"In dysfunctional family narratives, Fitch is to fiction what Eugene O'Neill is to drama."-Chicago Sun-Times
"Riveting. . . . An uncommonly accomplished page-turner."-Elle
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 woman whose pluck and growing self-awareness beautifully offset Meredith's emptiness. Their relationship transforms a big clich the artist's suicide into a page-turning psychodrama.
Customer Reviews
Once Again
This book is why I love to read. Her characters and their stories live within me now. Once you have read her work you will never forget how she uses words to create emotions that will stay with the reader long after you finish the book. Her books satisfies all of my senses leaving me wanting for more. Her next work of art is never soon enough. Ms. Fitch reaches into her soul to weave complexity, richness, and a depth of layers, pieces of herself given to the reader with the turning of each page. Her characters/stories are not carbon copies of previous work where she has the same characters plugging again and again into a set script. I throughly enjoy series books and there are many talented authors who write in that genre. This book is not that. So treat yourself and read her books. This as well as the previous one, White Oleander. You will thank your self.
Rita Anne Kincade-McDougal
May 14, 2017