Paint It Black: Josie Tyrell, white trash, artist’s model, teen runaway and denizen of LA’s 1980 punk rock scene, finds a chance at real love with art student Michael Faraday. A Harvard dropout and son of a renowned pianist, Michael introduces her to a world of sophistication, and to his own artistic quest for beauty. But when she receives a call from the Los Angeles County Coroner asking her to identify her lover’s dead body, her bright dreams fade to black. As Josie struggles to come to some new understanding of the Michael she thought she knew, she finds herself drawn into a dark and twisted relationship with his mother, Meredith. In mutual distrust and blind need they circle one another – their very survival and memory of Michael is at stake.

I will start this review with the inevitable mention of Janet Fitch’s White Oleander. I haven’t reread it in its entirety since I first read it as a teenager, but it was a book that blew me away with staggeringly beautiful writing. Maybe a touch melodramatic, but that hint of ethereal unreality made it a twisted mother-daughter nightmare. Astrid and Ingrid were otherworldly spirits whose tragedies and triumphs spoke deeply. I really liked that book – but as I said, I haven’t reread it for a long time and am not sure how I would read it now – and I am undoubtedly going to compare Paint It Black to White Oleander. The comparison is splashed over the cover, it practically begs it. Unfair as it may be. Each work to stand on its own merits. Fitch set herself an impossibly high standard with White Oleander.

Paint It Black is the story of Josie, punked-out model trash living on vodka and French cigarettes, and how she copes with the aftermath the suicide of her impossibly brilliant lover Michael. Michael’s famous mother, gifted pianist Meredith Loewy, and Josie share a destructive antagonistic relationship as they both attempt to come to terms with their jealousy, confusion and loss.

The first half of the novel is soaked in Josie’s adolescent musing. It does not have the depth or poetic intensity of White Oleander, it is more reminiscent of a lesser Francesca Lia Block novel, focusing as it does on Josie’s girlish laments on love and loss in Los Angeles. The idyllic conditions of Josie and Michael’s bohemian cottage is similar to the dream-world occupied by the characters of the Weetzie Bat series. Once Meredith and Michael are introduced into the story, and their backstory slowly revealed, you can’t help but feel that Fitch has chosen to focus on the least interesting character. While all the characters are deeply flawed, Josie seems to have little comprehension of her self and her situation. She fails to understand, repeatedly. She is lost, she is confused. Self-centred and often frustrating. Despite all this, all an understandable response to the situation she has found herself in, she is not unlikeable.

The novel descends into a Sunset Boulevard noirish trap, in which the two female characters find themselves struggling together and against each other in Meredith’s stately family home. As Josie uncovers more about Michael and his past, she comes to a greater understanding not only of herself, but of the world at large. Her devoutly visceral and physical presense – she maintains a sense of herself through her body, despite all the emotional and physical trauma she goes through – “just a body” allows her to hide the gradual evolution of her emotional self. She matures as a result of what she experiences and discovers, and it is a journey which unfolds gently, slowly, realistically. The character development here is delicately nuanced in a way I haven’t experienced in a while.

Paint It Black does not have the instant hypnotic effect of White Oleander, but it is a gritty portrait of grief and loss told with Fitch’s signature descriptive style.