You hear the stereotypes about conflicts between wives and mother-in-laws, that they're fighting over control of the husband/son. There's a difference, though, between the usual case of a mother-in-law being a bit possessive of their little boy, and an emotional enmeshment that's unhealthy. In Janet Fitch's Paint It Black, Josie Tyrell is intimidated by her boyfriend Michael's mother Meredith. She hears his stories of the way Meredith kept him close to her after his parents got divorced when he was a child, and the world he grew up in as the son of a leading concert pianist who traveled the world is wildly different than the one she grew up in and ran away from, on the wrong side of the tracks in an industrial city in southern California. They meet in Los Angeles, where Josie's working as an art model after dropping out of high school, and Michael goes to escape the Harvard education he never really wanted. They fall in love, rent a house together...and then Michael commits suicide.

His death comes at the very beginning of the novel, and over the course of its 400 pages we get the story of his relationship with Josie, and with his mother, as well as the two women's gradually intensifying connection after he's gone. It's tempting for Josie to play along with what Meredith wants, to give in to the ease and glamour of being a replacement for Michael. But there's a sense of a fly being drawn into a spider's web. Paint It Black is a study of grief, and the ways even the ones we think we share everything with remain mysterious to us, and the power of narcissists to prey on the vulnerable.

Clearly the relationships between mothers and daughters are something Janet Fitch finds compelling, as it was the focus of her big hit White Oleander and is explored in its own way here, with Josie becoming a kind of surrogate daughter to Meredith, who upgrades her from Michael's girlfriend to his fiancee for an air of legitimacy. The terms of this particular relationship, ostensibly between adults although with Meredith holding all the money and most of the obvious power, is an unusual one, and I thought Fitch wrote Josie's grief well enough that we could understand and empathize with how she becomes ensnarled in it. Speaking of writing, it's really the star of this book. I was constantly tabbing passages to come back to, that captured a feeling in an interesting and new way. It's lush and rich and evocative.

It could have used some editing, though. The book's biggest issue is that it's simply too long for the amount of material it actually has. It feels like it drags in the middle because it's just Josie mourning, and drinking, and taking pills, and being unable to help herself from being in contact with Meredith even though she knows she shouldn't be. And while I did very much enjoy the writing, it did at times feel circuitous and self-indulgent. The characters are not as well-developed or interesting as those in White Oleander, so if you're picking up this because you loved that, be prepared for a less fully realized novel. It's got merit, and if it seems interesting to you it's not a waste of your time to pick it up, but it's not a must-read. ( )

This riveting (fictional) account of a woman's coping with her boyfriend's suicide can be dark, but its never trite or sappy, deeply affecting, and at the end, inspiring.
The protagonist is an aspiring actress, and there's one chapter dealing with turning pain into art that is absolutely stunning. ( )

Josie is an art model and an actor in student films in LA. She meets Michael, a student, when she poses for an art class on The Human Form. She finds out he is a talented artist who is the son of a famous concert pianist, but little else. After living together for a year and a half, he tells her he "needs some space," and takes off. A week later, she is notified by the coroner, who found her name in a suicide note he left, that he blew his brains out in a motel room 3 hours East of LA. For the rest of the book, Josie follows through hints he left, finding out more and more, realizing she'd never known who the boy was that she thought she loved.

This author uses language lovingly, brutally, shaping it like clay in her hands, mapping her characters' hearts, souls, the emotions like a labyrinth, untangling the ugly, lonely, desperate human psyche like a tangled ball of yarn. Just an amazing talent. ( )

2.5*

This book was difficult to get through, and I believe a large part of that was how difficult it was to connect with any of the characters. They felt so removed from every day life that I could not identify with any of them. I am also not sure if I missed it, if I should have had the knowledge entering into the book, or if it was in fact never mentioned, but I did not understand why Josie and Michael could not be together.

I got the sense that the book was set several decades in the past, which is fine, but I do not think that was conveyed well. If that was in fact the case, then the divide between the Tyrell and Loewry families is more believable. Another problem that I had with the book was how little I felt I learned about Michael. From the summary of the novel, I thought it was going to be a book about Meredith and Josie going through a journey of togetherness because of their mutual relationship with Michael. However, that is not what I got at all.

I really enjoyed White Oleander, and I felt like the two books had a lot of commonalities, however, I would not recommend this book to many people.


****spoilers below this line****
First of all, Meredith and Josie never actually get along. The only highlights of the book were when they were fighting over something that was "just in Josie's imagination." Although, I assure you, she was not imagining anything. Furthermoore, the book ends with Josie finding some semblance of closure over Michael's death, and it has nothing to do with Meredith. This was extremely disappointing because the book is not marketed as such. To me, that is a completely different type of novel than what I thought I was getting into. I also do not think that was done well either. ( )

She writes with brilliant insight that gives her characters a lifelike dimension, enough that even if you have nothing in common with them you can still sympathize with their struggles. ( )