[In the following excerpt, Mitchell offers a positive assessment of The Longest Memory.]

Many contemporary black writers exhibit a preoccupation with history—both public and personal—in their work. Because blacks have not always had the opportunity to engage in self-representation, they understand the importance of being able to tell one's own story. Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson and Maryse Conde have situated their most critically acclaimed novels—Beloved, Middle Passage, and I Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, respectively—within the historical context of American slavery. By presenting slavery from the slaves’ perspective they not only record and preserve the slaves history and culture but also provide a look at the interior lives of black men and women. Younger black writers such as A. J. Verdelle, Fred D'Aguiar and Lionel Newton also situate their recently released novels within a particular historical context in order to illuminate the interior lives of black people. …

In The Longest Memory, his first novel, Guyanese writer Fred D'Aguiar examines the legacies of American slavery. D'Aguiar uses the memories of his characters to tell his story by means of various techniques and mediums: first-person narrations, stream of consciousness, shifting narrative voices, newspapers, diaries, and poetry. He also explores a multitude of themes, including miscegenation and fatherhood.

In his meditation on memory and history, D'Aguiar also examines the familial and romantic relations between blacks and whites. Set in 19th-century Virginia, the narrative centers on the plight of an elderly slave father who tries to save his escaped son's life by revealing his whereabouts. After he is returned to the plantation, the son is whipped to death by his half-brother, the overseer. In this ironic situation, D'Aguiar juxtaposes the contrasting beliefs of the father, who believes in the “safety” of slavocracy's status quo, and the son, who is educated and in love with the master's daughter and wants to emancipate himself from slavery. The father then is left feeling responsible for his only son's death. Of his selfish act, he concludes, “I killed my son because I wanted him next to me when I died.”

D'Aguiar creates “the longest memory” through a mosaic of events that allows all of the characters to recount their respective recollections of the events. This is primarily a story of fathers and sons; the women of this novel are flat characters who serve only to help define the male characters. Overall, the novel's strengths are in its illumination of slavery's devastating psychological effects on all of its participants, black and white, and of the often unexamined psychology of the slave community. …