James Baldwin's "Go Tell It on the Mountain" … is a first novel of quite exceptional promise, centering on a church in Harlem…. The Temple of the Fire Baptized is the scene of a conflict between a growing boy with a real vocation and his preacher stepfather, a compulsive lecher whose sense of guilt, rather than a true call, has brought him to the pulpit…. Mr. Baldwin … gives an extraordinarily vivid picture of the intellectual seediness and poverty of this kind of religious life and of the secular life that produces it….

But for all its abundant virtues there is something lacking in the book; its perfections are wooden and it is without vitality in spite of its realism. When one compares it with Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," the deficiency immediately declares itself. Ellison's novel was emotionally disturbing and extremely serious, but it was also rich in comic invention…. Mr. Baldwin's God-intoxicated lecher, with his roving eye and his inflamed conscience, which always arrives on the scene too late, carries farce with him wherever he goes, and if one treats him with Kafkaesque solemnity, the life goes out of him and the spiritual tragedy of his congregation loses a dimension…. Mr. Baldwin's novel is humorless, and the result is that it seems not more dignified or more understanding but less penetrating.