No one today excels James Baldwin in the writing of invective. His art is nourished and sustained by an unquenchable rage. He is, essentially, a prophet, with a prophet's ear for the cadences of desolation. Those cadences inform his long new novel, Just Above My Head, which is principally concerned with the life and times of a gospel singer named Arthur Montana….

Arthur is a homosexual, like his creator. He finds himself doubly alienated from American society: for most of his short life he is afraid to tell even his closest friends about his feelings. He is something of an emotional cripple…. Yet the nature of Arthur's despair is never seriously examined, although it is constantly referred to. His trip to the abyss is disposed of in a couple of paragraphs. Baldwin rages, and rhapsodizes, and editorializes, but seldom gets down to the proper business of the novelist, which is to establish character and incident. The reader is told about Arthur's misery, and is indeed lectured at on the subject, but that gigantic sorrow remains undramatized—except, to be fair, when Arthur is singing. Baldwin, not surprisingly, writes superbly when his people are making music.

The narrator of Just Above My Head is Arthur's elder brother, Hall. Hall's method of telling the story is neither laconic nor suggestive: it is repetitive, explanatory, hectoring, and prone to flights of lyricism that are not always appropriate….

And then, of course, there is sex, with all the accompanying euphemisms…. Why is that the furtive glances, the held hands, the mere kissing and cuddling in the great poems of Cavafy is more genuinely erotic, more indicative of tenderness and the glowing pleasure of love, than the gymnastic bouts that Baldwin describes so exhaustively? Besides, too much thriving copulation slows up the action.

The finest scenes in Just Above My Head take place in church, which is Baldwin's natural habitat. The prose is celebratory, its rage contained. Rage can beget poetry, sermons, essays—but it is not helpful to the ambitious novelist. It blinkers the vision; it makes the writer settle for the immediate effect. Too much in this novel is merely effective….

Still, a restrained James Baldwin is unimaginable. His is a generous anger, the anger of a brave and honourable man. It is a pity that his most notable quality as a human being is also his severest limitation as a novelist.