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Janet Fitch's debut novel, White Oleander, was the kind of book you loved to recommend.
It was a compelling, original, beautifully written story with characters who stayed with you for years. Oprah Winfrey anointed it one of her book club picks upon its publication in 1999.
Now Fitch has returned with her second novel, Paint It Black. Fitch remains an enormously talented writer, but her new book lacks the variety of characters from different social classes that made Oleander so satisfying. Oleander succeeded because Fitch captured the hidden world of foster families and kids with mothers in prison.
Lacking this richness, Black eventually becomes tiresome.
The story focuses on the punk scene in Los Angeles in 1980. The heroine is Josie Tyrell, a teen runaway from Bakersfield. Smart, hardworking, intellectually curious and striking in appearance, she clearly is one of life's survivors, except that she is blind to her own value because of an abusive, neglectful, deprived childhood.
Enter Michael Faraday. He's a brilliant, cultured 22-year-old Harvard dropout. His mother is a famous pianist, and his father is an acclaimed, Hemingway-esque writer. An art student, Michael meets Josie while she is modeling for his class. They fall in love and live together, until, in Chapter 1, the coroner tells Josie that Michael has killed himself.
The rest of the book unravels the truth about their love affair and Michael's tortured relationship with his divorced parents, especially his bond with his mother, the Medea-like Meredith.
In many passages, Fitch displays her talent. She 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.
Unfortunately, the novel focuses primarily on whiny Michael and manipulative Meredith. After her son's death, she tries to alternately destroy and ensnare Josie.
Too many novels are devoted to the cares and woes of the over-educated upper crust. When page after page is devoted to the lifestyles of the neurotic rich, the reader wants to hear more about Josie's white-trash childhood back in the Bakersfield tow-truck yard.
When you don't care about two of the three major characters in a novel, it doesn't matter how good the writing might be. Paint it dull.
Paint It Black
By Janet Fitch
Little, Brown, 387 pp., $24.99
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