It isn't hard to see why James Baldwin in particular has chosen to shape his sixth novel along the lines of a saga in the contemporary mode. His fiction has often been attacked, notably by younger black writers in the 1960's, as too personal, too patently a working-out of inner conflict at the price of distorting the realities of race and racial conflict in America….

It may well be that "Just Above My Head" is Baldwin's attempt to answer such criticism. The novel takes in 30 years in the lives of a group of friends, who start out preaching and singing in Harlem churches, survive (or do not survive) incest, war, poverty, the civil-rights struggle, as well as wealth and love and fame…. (p. 3)

From this account, one would guess that "Just Above My Head" would be sprawling, hellish, joyous, as well as thick with political, economic and social reference. The curious fact is that it's so narrow, so tame. Baldwin's focus is still the private self; he has given us another of his warm, melancholy, basically likable novels and hasn't really made use of his elaborate generational-historical scheme…. The truth is that outward events as such do not call forth Baldwin's artistry. He does not care deeply enough as an artist about their concreteness. Even when Arthur and his entourage are attacked by racist police in an Atlanta street, Baldwin the novelist is only interested, only compelled to art, by the protective reaction of Arthur's older brother Hall; Baldwin the essayist, Baldwin the author of "The Fire Next Time," would have had more to say about the police, about Atlanta, about the street.

The effect of Baldwin's lack of concreteness can be eerie. He describes hundreds of faces in this long novel, but hardly a single place in any detail. So the book seems to float with faces, eyes endlessly meeting eyes. The most common incident is the heartfelt reunion: long-separated friends grasping each other by the shoulder, reaffirming old love. It is only in such scenes, or in the explicitly sexual encounters that sometimes follow, that Baldwin is sufficiently patient and attentive and observant. He has slighted the richness of his own material by merely scanning it, looking for opportunities to do his favorite scenes: ambivalent sex, reunions, quick accesses of love.

But Baldwin's favorite scenes are not without their pleasures for the reader, and if "Just Above My Head" is not a break-through for Baldwin into the novel whose social-historical context is convincing and secure, it is nonetheless a break-through of another, more modest kind. He has decided to entrust the telling to a narrator who is close to a way of life largely missing from Baldwin's previous fiction…. Hall's situation as a family man enables Baldwin to take account of realities that are more mundane than those he has addressed before. His treatment of middle-class life turns out to be surprisingly sensitive. (pp. 3, 33)

Hall Montana's voice is the conduit for Baldwin's most distinctive quality as a writer, his abundant tenderness. At its best, this tenderness is the emphatic sign that his imagination is closely bound up with his immense compassion, but the result can be intrusive. Sometimes he can hardly refrain from openly commiserating with his characters, so that good clear emotions are smothered by authorial comment. Perhaps an author's tenderness doesn't have to be serviceable to his craft; perhaps tenderness is a virtue in itself. But "Go Tell It on the Mountain" is arguably Baldwin's best novel because its people, however feelingly conceived, are still allowed a measure of independence from their author.

Despite Hall's moving voice, his brother Arthur is merely a figure of fantasy. His sweetness and vulnerability are curiously bloodless. Indeed, there is no explanation given for his fragility, except that he needs to live the blues he sings—which is no explanation at all. His career's decline is predictable, and what might have been most interesting about his life, his 15-year love affair with his accompanist, Julia's brother, is disappointingly rendered. Their love brings out all the lurking sentimentality in Baldwin's style, drowning the individuality of the characters….

As it is, Hall cannot keep the present book entirely together. There are, as always, scenes in which Baldwin's precision matches his force of feeling—glimpses of family life in Harlem, rapturous music-making in the churches, moments of uneasiness in even the most casual meetings between whites and blacks—scenes that Baldwin seems preternaturally gifted in understanding. Such scenes, unfortunately, are not always there when the reader wants them. No one, I think, will find this novel consistently absorbing or entertaining or insightful, though it is all of those things in places; and then there are places where it is forced and repetitious. It would be good to say that "Just Above My Head" is a work of passion rather than a work of art, and so to lay the blame for its unevenness upon the veering, shifting forces of Baldwin's inspiration; but there is too much that is inchoate, unrealized. The consummation of James Baldwin's art has not yet come to pass. (p. 33)