1980s Los Angeles, the art/punk scene, a young woman distraught over the suicide of her painter boyfriend.  Josie Tyrell is in her early twenties, and she was living with Michael Faraday, but she hadn't seen him for a while, because he had secluded himself away to work on his art.  Then she gets a call from the Coroner asking her to identify a Michael's body.  Josie is distraught and her life goes off the rails as she immerses herself in sorrow.  Her life is made worse by the hate directed at her by Michael's mother, Meredith Loewy, who is a pianist.  Yet only through coming to understand Michael's family history will Josie find out why he killed himself, and only through talking to Josie will Meredith understand the last part of her son's life, so the two women are drawn to each other.  As the days go by, Josie learns that Michael lied to her about many parts of his life.  Her life seems pointless without him, and she starts to wonder whether her relationship with him was meaningless.  The reader wonders whether Josie will decide to copy Michael's suicide. 

Janet Fitch's writing in Paint It Black is saturated with a sense of despondency and degeneration.   Josie sits around her apartment, drives around the city in her car, goes to clubs, hangs out with her friends, taking some drugs or getting drunk, and continuously feels terrible.  I found that listening to the abridged audiobook read by Jennifer Jason Leigh (the perfect performer for this book) was entertaining, but slogging through the unabridged print version was hard work.  Looking over the reader comments at Amazon.com, it becomes clear that reader reactions to the book are split into two: some people had the same reaction as myself, and could not bring themselves to finish the book.  Others found it inspiring and declared it a literary masterpiece. 

The book is very psychological in its themes: it dwells on shock, depression, grief, family secrets, and the effect of childhood experience on later life.  Yet I found its treatment heavy handed and rather clichéd: a rebellious young man from a rich and talented family meets a runaway teen from a down-and-out background.  Despite their differences, they manage to find hope in each other because they understand their shared isolation, but their flawed backgrounds doom their relationship.  The alternative music scene provides a stylish background for all this, but it would do more for the story if it was a movie rather than a book.