Just Above My Head is a large work which concerns itself with many things and treats each of them with great reverence. There are no ready-made formulas for drama here. The images and voices of this book come so completely to life that, once submerged, the reader might expect to come across one of the characters or places on the streets of his own world. At the onset one is led to believe that Hall Montana, the omniscient narrator, is about to embark on a self-cleansing confessional rendering of the life and early death of his brother, Arthur. But Baldwin smoothly transforms the novel into a rigorous dissection of the narrator's memory—a study of the individual as affected by experiences as they occur and by memories of those experiences. Hall Montana is a multi-dimensional character in both his moment-to-moment living in the remembered story and in his role as reflecting story-teller. The contrast between Hall as a simple character and Hall as omniscient narrator unveiling the past offers the reader a rare and clear look at the human psyche caught in the endless process of the present unfolding into the future, as well as a troubling glimpse of the mind's powerlessness in relation to its memories….

While reading this work one realizes that the author is trying to disarm a series of obsessions which involve time, experience, memory-history, and the jungle of our separateness as persons. The mood throughout the book is very serious, even worried. One becomes overwhelmed by the feeling that if the narrator can uncover his past with precision, without succumbing to the distortions of wishful reminiscing, he will come to an "oasis" and be freed of his "unanswerable weight" and, in turn, free us of ours….

Although the characters of this novel are black, the thrust of the work is not so much ethnic as it is simply human. It is about people in relation to struggles, both cerebral and physical, that history and circumstance relentlessly concoct for them. If there is fault of any consequence with this work it is in the narrator's total dominance of it. The other characters, particularly Arthur Montana (who is fascinating and whom the book, at various intervals, suggests it's really about), come up a little flat if the reader tries to view them independent of the narrator's ideas, but through Hall Montana James Baldwin has succeeded in creating a powerful drama, both complex and clear. The message of Just Above My Head is compassionate. It seems the narrator ultimately feels we can rise above the idiocy, panic, and injustice that history offers as our one constant inheritance.