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It's hard
for me to write about this book without sounding like one
of those praise montages used in movie trailers: "Brilliant!"
"Stunning!" "Moving!" You know what I'm
talking about. But I'll try to keep the gushing in check,
I promise.
A few weeks ago I picked up a copy of Paint it Black
at a bookstore, thrilled to pieces that Janet Fitch had followed
up my favorite novel, White Oleander. I'd read White
Oleander as a University of North Texas dropout, during
the summer following a fatal car crash that had killed the
man I'd been seeing. I would not have called him my true love,
even then, but there did exist between us the hopeful promise
typical of a new affair. For weeks after his death, I wandered,
lost without him. For months, I waded through so many different
feelings, so many questions, so many unsuccessful attempts
at distraction. I've noticed that certain books find you when
they're most needed and least expected. It was during this
time that White Oleander found me.
I think it's appropriate that I began reading Paint it
Black in the weeks just preceding the fifth anniversary
of my lover's death. I had no idea what the book was really
about; I just wanted to get my hands on anything else this
woman had written. The rainy winter of California began to
creep into my Texas living room as Josie, the protagonist,
was called into a coroner's office to identify the body of
her boyfriend, Michael, who had died in what is obviously
a suicide. The story unfolds with the same delicious and disturbing
detail as Fitch's previous novel.
Josie is a twenty-year-old denizen of the early eighties L.A.
punk scene. Fitch sketches her as a bleach-blonde art model,
constantly soaked in music and vodka. (I should mention when
reading this book one should expect to purchase several bottles
of Stoli. One might also find oneself drinking straight from
the bottle.) This foul-mouthed heroine led me down a familiar
rabbit hole of "booze and some downers, the wine and
bread of forgetting." I read on, remembering how it had
been to drive around town late at night looking, without direction,
for the man I lost, just as Josie did. I remembered smelling
pillowcases and feeling hatred toward him as I cried over
his absence. Feeling so "hopelessly off trail, and there
weren't going to be any more markers, not for a thousand miles."
I remember even the sun seeming as if it had been blotted
out of the sky. Darkness.
After the confusing darkness of loss, Fitch shows us the light
and what might be the beginnings of answers for Josie's questions.
Reading a book with such a broad cross-section of allusion
is delectably consuming. The haunting voices of the great
wanderers Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, Anne Sexton, and Blaise
Cendrars are masterfully assimilated into the prose. Through
Paint it Black, I found peace with the past.
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