One would hardly call Paint It Black an uplifting novel. Then again, uplift is not something exactly expected from the follow-up to the similarly poignant White Oleander. The book focuses on Josie Tyrell, a young model and actress, coping with boyfriend Michael Loewy’s suicide. If this sounds like a terribly trite account of fame and glamour, it is not. Paint It Black is a space where grief, love, beauty, and art are explored, all in due time.

Time is perhaps the most remarkable element of Janet Fitch’s work. Fitch observes that after great loss, time does not stop so much as it proves irrelevant. Thus we are left to dwell on Josie’s memories of Michael in a tapestry of images and ideas that exists more strongly than present sadness. Getting lost in Fitch’s wistful language and broken atmosphere, one no longer distinguishes past from present, or the living from the dead.

Thus we get the vivid image of Michael musing about the prayer wheels of Nepal. People would inscribe prayers onto these wheels, and the prayers would go out into the universe as the wheels were spun. Josie likes the idea of having something pray for her, so she writes prayers on the wheels of a fellow model’s skateboard. She imagines her words stretching into the universe every time the skateboard rolls along the street, its rider unaware of the prayers he is creating.

Josie’s meeting with Lola Lola, the head singer of a German punk band, is equally captivating. Jose and Lola Lola get high at a party, discussing the suicides of their lovers and the beauty of the true world. To Josie the true world is not in the object but in the subject. It always exists, but one can only catch it in glimpses.

Reading Paint It Black becomes a search for these glimpses of beauty – Josie and Michael painting Montmartre on the walls of their apartment, Michael’s mother thundering away on the piano, Michael explaining the difference between Bach and Brahms, how the former believed in order, while the latter wanted to believe, but had everything fall apart.

One does not often know where the story is going, but that is precisely the point – once Michael is dead, Josie has nowhere to go. The work becomes a long train of thoughts, where one association takes the reader somewhere unexpected and perhaps unnecessary, only to loop back to the same point. One appreciates this wonderfully profound yet ultimately tenuous atmosphere of sadness.

For anyone wishing to wander in thought and memory, Paint It Black is well worth the read.