Moralistic fervor, a high literary seriousness, the authority of the survivor, of the witness—these qualities made Baldwin unique. In his best work, he is drawn to the ways in which life can go wildly wrong, to examinations of the damage done the individual by society. Another bloodied stone is always waiting to be turned over. A sense of mission has guided Baldwin's development as a writer. He was truly born with his subject matter, and yet for a long time his work showed a feeling of distrust for the promises of "pure" literature, a sense of its impotence, both personally and as a political weapon. In his youth Baldwin wanted to be identified not as a black but as a writer. It is a conflict he has never resolved.

Just Above My Head is a long and ambitious novel in which we find again many of Baldwin's obsessions. He returns to the Harlem and the church of his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953); to the homosexuality of Giovanni's Room (1955) and Another Country (1962); and to the social and political outrage that has inspired all his work. Whether the visions of the past are still vivid is another question….

[The voice of Hall, the narrator,] is not very fluent and this makes for something of a strain in such a long work. The burden of editorial omniscience, including what his brother felt while having sex, forces Hall's imagination to do more work than it can bear….

Here, as throughout Baldwin's other work, flight is at the center of the psychological drama. The characters believe in the possibilities of another evening, a different place, a new face. The world is revealed to them at night, in the hours of nakedness, drinking, and truth-telling.

Although Hall tells many detailed ancedotes of the adolescent years of Julia and the two brothers, particularly Arthur, as they move into maturity his narration becomes more urgent and elliptical, as if he were uneasily aware that the story he wished to tell is too large. Crucial moments that would help us understand what he and his brother were going through are only hinted at….

Arthur himself never emerges from the shadows of his brother's descriptions, but it is clear that he is very different from the subversive heroes of Baldwin's earlier novels. He is homosexual, but seen sentimentally…. He is meant to be a kind of artist hero, hard-working, dedicated, tragically undone by the rages of their lives. He unfortunely lacks the willfulness and chaotic interest of other artists in Baldwin's fiction—the jazz musician Rufus Scott in Another Country, the actor Leo Proudhammer in Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone (1968). For Baldwin, the time for a daring portrayal of the homosexual as outcast appears to have passed. He seems now to be trying to make a sentimental truce between the outcast and the family, meaning the black community….

For Baldwin, it once seemed possible that spiritual bondage could be overcome by belief in a transcendent passion. Freedom from sexual and racial bigotry was the only redemptive possibility for the individual confined and menaced by society. In Baldwin's fiction homosexuality is symbolic of a liberated condition; but in Just Above My Head this theme is dropped—rejected, one might say—by having the homosexual characters imitate heterosexual behavior. By the time Arthur dies, he and Jimmy have been married fourteen years, complete with in-laws.

The anxious tone of this novel is a long way from the romantic melancholy of Giovanni's Room, a book neglected not only because of its homosexual protagonists but also because in it Baldwin was writing exclusively about white characters. (p. 32)

Abandoning his idealism about love, Baldwin now writes sentimentally not only about Arthur but about the entire Montana family. The parents are wise, forgiving, and everyone is uniformly resilient and "caring." If Baldwin means to honor the family as one of the reasons why blacks have, if nothing else, survived, his way of doing so is hardly convincing. Giving to the family generous amounts of noble qualities results in a neat symmetry: us versus them. The hagiographic approach helps to account for the flatness and didacticism of this work, as it did of Baldwin's last novel, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), a book that was also dogmatic in its insistence on families and marriage as joyous alliances against an oppressively conceived "them." From Baldwin's other writings, one knows he has had a far more complicated idea of the family.

Increasing disillusionment over the years may have led Baldwin to search for something like a "people's book." But there is a repetitious and inert quality to Just Above My Head. Attempting to be earthy, to render a vernacular, black speech, Baldwin loses something when he declines to use the subtle language of his essays. In many ways the bombast in Hall's narration creates not a closeness to the material but a peculiar distance from it. In using a kind of ordinary language, hoping for what Richard Wright once called "the folk utterance," Baldwin has denied himself the natural lyrical mode of expression for which he has such a high gift….

When Baldwin was young, in Paris, he quarreled with his "spiritual father," Richard Wright, over Baldwin's attack on the genre of protest novels. Wright felt betrayed and Baldwin defended himself by saying that all literature may be protest but not all protest was literature. Later, when recalling Wright's isolation from other blacks in Paris, his aloneness, his alienation, Baldwin wrote: "I could not help feeling: Be Careful. Time is passing for you, too, and this may be happening to you one day." Baldwin now writes as if he is haunted by this prophecy. Just Above My Head, with its forced polemical tone, represents a conversion of sorts, a conversion to simplicities that so fine a mind as Baldwin's cannot embrace without grave loss. (p. 33)