In his famous essay, "Everybody's Protest Novel," published in Partisan Review in 1949, when he was only twenty-four, Baldwin announced his determination to reject the pattern of protest that a Negro writer in America was expected to follow. Instead of depicting the black man as "merely a member of a Society or a Group" who has been condemned by the white oppressors to poverty and ignorance, Baldwin chose to understand him as "something resolutely indefinable, unpredictable." (p. 73)

In that bold refusal to be manacled to the racial shibboleths of the "protest novel," Baldwin even felt free, during his expatriate years in France, to write a novel about white homosexuals, Giovanni's Room, in the first person, if only to prove that he could do without the black-and-white chessboard on which black fiction played out its predictable despair. Yet Giovanni's Room was an act of bravura, not an interesting novel. Baldwin's true and magnificent voice could be heard in his essays and in autobiographical stories like "Notes of a Native Son," his poignant memoir of the summer of 1943, when his father died during a bloody riot in Harlem. Even after he returned to America in the early 60's, in eager response to the civil-rights movement and the rise of black nationalism, he seemed, in the lamentative reflections about race of The Fire Next Time, to speak out of the privacy of his mind and heart rather than as the "voice of his people." Although it prophesied a terrifying apocalypse, the essay was distinguished by its lucid dignity. It was, however, the last time he would keep his distance from the anger and hatred he had warned against in his precocious attack on the protest novel.

Despite his effort to establish his black identity, the extremist blacks would not forgive Baldwin his past. Toward the end of the 60's, Eldridge Cleaver included a vicious attack on Baldwin in Soul on Ice…. (pp. 73-4)

In the face of Cleaver's castigation and the savage—and envious—diatribes of other black nationalists, Baldwin's stubborn independence caved in. It was hard to believe that the paranoid hysteria of No Name in the Streets (1972)—a curious requiem for Martin Luther King, Jr., in which Baldwin renounced King's credo of nonviolence and celebrated the guerrilla tactics of the Black Panthers—came from the same sensibility which, twenty years earlier, had declared that "the oppressed and the oppressor are bound together within the same society, they accept the same criteria … they both alike depend on the same reality." By this point he could even bring himself to praise Soul on Ice and justify Cleaver's assault on him as "a necessary warning."

Given Baldwin's cultivated urbanity and nonconformist temperament, there was no reason to assume that his commitment to the black cause would diminish his rhetorical brilliance or that he would no longer use his complex personal history and attitudes in his fiction. Yet in 1962 he did attempt, in Another Country, to forge a language that was more austere and "unpoetic" than the lapidary biblical cadences of his natural style. So great was the strain of his effort to write against the grain that he vitiated his intelligence with sentimentality and his psychological intensity with cynical violence. Neither was he able in two later novels—Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968) and If Beale Street Could Talk (1974)—to achieve that fusion of emotion and language which once endowed his essays with incandescent power and clarity.

Now Baldwin has tried to conquer the novel again, and it is obvious that he has staked a great deal on his new book. Just Above My head is the most ambitious effort Baldwin has made to portray the black communal life and culture whose absence from the protest novel he lamented long ago, when he deplored its inability to render "the relationship that Negroes bear to one another, that depth of involvement and unspoken recognition of shared experience which creates a way of life." A huge chronicle about the children of two Harlem families from the Korean war to the present, his new book will not please those of Baldwin's critics who feel that his obsession with sex squanders talent better spent in the service of his race. But although he devotes many pages to explicit accounts of both homosexual and heterosexual love to dramatize his familiar themes of love as torment and redemption, his primary concern is the black family and the children—Hall and Arthur Montana, Julia and Jimmy Miller—whose lifelong attachment is the constant of their separate destinies….

The story shuttles erratically between past and present, but only when Baldwin is writing about the Montana family when the boys were young do the characters seem substantially realized…. (p. 74)

Just Above My Head is a curiously static work, partly because Baldwin seems unable to define his conception of Hall Montana: whether he is an autonomous being to whom things happen or an ill-fitting mask for the intrusive author busily shifting the scenery, revising the dialogue, and commenting sententiously on every turn of the wheel. Only the scenes in Harlem, and some later episodes in the South, when Arthur travels to Birmingham and Atlanta to sing at church rallies during the early civil-rights days, have the certainty of touch and the sharply observed detail that can allow the characters to breathe on their own. Too much of the time Baldwin the black advocate loads his pages with crude menace … or woolly abstraction … or meandering tirades against Marxists and liberals, neither of whom are part of the story.

Though the novel seems to have been conceived as a portrayal of black family life, Baldwin loses sight of his purpose so easily that it is stillborn. Ironically, when Hall and Julia finally settle down in nearby towns in Westchester, in the comfortable stability of middle age, they are neither black nor white, just middle class, and Baldwin seems undisturbed by the deracination. But everything he says about race in the book and elsewhere would contradict such indifference to the loss of authenticity. The problem, 1 suspect, arises from Baldwin's inability to decide exactly where he belongs in the black world today, and what role he must fill. His nervous irresolution was clear in a recent interview; at one moment the black crusader declaring the obsolescence of white America, in the next warning writers against such slogans, and affirming that literature is indispensable to the world. Caught between these claims to his intelligence, his language, and his dedication to his people, Baldwin has written a novel that drifts and flounders in the riptide of uncertainty. (p. 75)