Before I Forget, Revisited

n reading over my review of Before I Forget, by Leonard Pitts, Jr., I realized that I had not said all I wanted to say about the book, so I’m revisiting it now.

In my previous review of the book I focused on how dramatic it is, but I don’t think that the drama in the book is exactly similar to soap opera drama, as I earlier asserted. The truth is that the book is driven forward by dramatic, that is to say intense and often emotional, events. The story of the book kind of explodes outward like the Big Bang must have. We start the story with Mo, a singer that was popular during the Motown era of music, who discovers that he has early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, and his son Trey, who robs a convenience store with two of his friends. The plot explodes out from here, where we meet characters that are connected to these two, like Mo’s wife, Trey’s child, the family of one of Trey’s friends, etc. This enormous web of characters who all seem to be going through significant life events creates the illusion that the story is overly dramatic, but really, the story is plot focused more than anything, which will often create the illusion of excess drama.

Kanye West would probably seriously enjoy what this book is doing, because it’s all about exposure, (though he may find the novel’s critique of rap music to be offensive.) In a world where minorities struggle silently with poverty and oppression, one of the most important ways to be an activist is to simply vocalize the problems at hand. Once problems are no longer invisible, it is harder to ignore them, and easier to fix them. Kanye does this all of the time in his music. For example, in the song We Don’t Care Kanye is basically making the lives of poor black people and culture visible in order to better understand why so many people in that community turn to selling drugs in order to make money. In Before I Forget, Pitts is doing this with the issue of black fatherhood. In the story we see four generations of black men—Mo’s father James, Mo, Trey, and Trey’s son DeVante—in various stages of being fathers and sons. As the characters struggle in their roles, we as readers have the world of black fatherhood illuminated to us.
I felt that I took away from this novel an understanding of the lives of African Americans today that I did not have before. Never before have I read something that made it so starkly clear the issues at hand in black fatherhood. Because we see four generations of black men in the story, it is easy to see how a poor model of fatherhood is passed down from generation to generation, and it also becomes possible to see how this cycle might be broken. This novel gives voice to those who often cannot speak, and in that sense, I think it is a very important book.

The writing of the book is clearly the writing of a journalist. I was asked in a comment on my previous review of the book how I thought that the journalistic voice in this novel compares to the voice of Hunter S. Thompson in Hell’s Angels. This question is interesting to me, because Hell’s Angels, in some ways, seemed to be written in less of a journalist voice than this book did, even though Hell’s Angels was intended to be a book of journalism. The difference, I think, is that Thompson isn’t trying to tell a story in his book, he’s trying to paint a picture of a society, and so he writes with a heavy amount of description and scene setting. He goes into depth about the history of the places and people he’s writing about. He very much wants you to see what he’s trying to portray. Pitts, on the other hand, is telling a story. He wants his book to move fast from dramatic event to dramatic event, which creates a kind of epic feel to his novel. Perhaps Pitts wanted his writing to be more imagistic, or perhaps he wanted to preserve the style of writing that he has developed over the years that is highly journalist, like a razor, straight and to the point. More than anything, these days, it’s a question of style. Certainly the main news stories that you read on the BBC or anywhere else will be written in extremely stark, easy to read, and to the point language because it is the facts that are important, but anytime you venture toward stories that involve (overtly) opinion as well as fact in journalism, you’re opening yourself up to a whole host of different writing styles. Pitts is more direct, Thompson is more flowery. Anyone saying that one style is better, or more literary than another is simply asserting their personal preference as fact.

I found Before I Forget to be a very enjoyable and evocative novel. There were a few moments, mostly when the story of Mo’s father’s life is told, where I felt that things got a little heavy-handed and over the top, but other than that the story was enlightening and moving.