Paint It Black: A Novel Review

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Paint It Black: A Novel Review"White Oleander" is absolutely brilliant, one of my favorite books ever, so I was eager to read Janet Fitch's second novel. Unfortunately, "Paint it Black" doesn't hold half a stubby, burned-out candle to "White Oleander." I really wish I could say otherwise, because I loved Fitch's writing in her first book. Her second book just isn't, frankly, very good. I finally finished the turgid, endless thing yesterday and I'm so happy I don't have to read it any more.
Why does this book fail? My top three reasons:
1) There's almost no dialogue in the whole thing. And since they're so mute, the characters don't come to life at all.
2) I didn't care about any of the characters. At all.
And the thing is, characters don't have to be likeable for a reader to be invested in them. Fitch did a freakin' genius job of making evil Ingrid Magnusson of "White Oleaner" intriguing, attractive, even sympathetic in a twisted kind of way. Meredith Loewy of "Paint it Black," on the other hand, is a stick-figure Rich Bitch. Yawn.
Her son Michael, suicide victim, is supposed to have been oh so great: handsome, talented, erudite, smart, loveable. However, all of his actions show him to have been a snob, a pathological liar, and a whiny, overprivileged downer. Sure it's sad when anybody offs himself, but with this guy there ain't a lot to miss. It's hard to understand why Josie was in love with him in the first place.
And then there's our heroine Josie, who spends most of the book wandering around L.A. in a drunken stupor thinking the same thoughts over and over. This might be OK if it were a short story. As a novel it's unbearably boring.
3) Other reviewers have been spot-on when they've said the book is REPETITIVE. If I have to read "punked-out bleached hair," "voddy," "ciggie," "Smirny," "Blaise," "Jeanne" or "Montmarte" one more time in my life I am going to go insane. (Hmmm, maybe that's what drove Michael over the edge, too...)
The maddening repetition is more than just these cutesy slang words used ad nauseam, though. Fitch repeats phrases and sentences from earlier in the novel over and over, too. Now, it's a great thing in a novel to connect with earlier chapters and scenes and come to new revelations. But just quoting earlier passages verbatim but--italicizing them!--is lazy, lazy writing. Fitch can do better.
All in all, a very big letdown. I'd have given it one star, but I do believe Fitch is a good writer. Her second book unfortunately doesn't show her talent at all. It's really a shame that so few literary agents and publishing houses are willing to give first-time novelists a chance at being published, because so many writers seem to have only one good novel in them. I'm afraid Fitch may be one of them.Paint It Black: A Novel Overview

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