[Just Above My Head is] a melancholy piece of creation. Swollen …, meandering, awkwardly colloquial, and pretentiously elevated by turns, the book agitatedly contains four or five major themes that never are brought into coherence with one another. Dealing with experiences that clearly have meant a great deal to Baldwin, it is a novel stuck halfway between life and art, with none of the originality or fatefulness of either.

The mélange of themes I mentioned includes family relationships, religious passion and its repudiation, homosexuality, heterosexuality, and the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Baldwin's narrator, one Hall Montana, is in many respects his alter ego in a damaging sense. This is especially so in the bitter anti-white strain that runs spasmodically and inelegantly through the book …, although there is one section, an apologia for homosexuality that seems quite unrelated to the rest of the novel but at least has an eloquence lacking everywhere else, in which Baldwin's taking over for his fictional character seems appropriate….

The intricacies of [personal] relationships are worked out against a political background that is never sharply seen but whose remembered atrocities seem to feed Baldwin's diffuse and inexpressive rage….

Montana is "trying to piece together this story … attempting to stammer out this tale" and to do this he has "had to strip myself naked." Now such authorial rhetoric as this ought to alert us not to the potential profundity of the book but just the opposite, to some imaginative debility, specifically an inability to absorb one's materials and transform them into fictional existence. And indeed the entire novel feels uncompleted, not in the sense of lacking a narrative conclusion or being without some structural component, but as a matter of process; Baldwin never seems to get past the instigations to the book, its origins in his experience, into its realizations.

The most obvious sign of this failure is the way the novel moves uncertainly from one motif to another. But at a more subtle level it displays itself as an inhibiting of novelistic action: events, things done, things done in the mind. There can be few novels of this length and scope in which there is so much talk, and talk of a peculiarly inert kind. People are forever sitting down to explain themselves to each other, to reminisce, recapitulate, or forecast—all of it, it sometimes seems, as a defense of their right to be in the novel…. [Their] speech alternates between aggressive jive and street talk on the one hand and a literary rhetoric of portentous hyperbole on the other. The latter is especially pronounced when the narrator periodically takes charge…. (p. 30)

I have seen Baldwin's novel described as being about love, but it isn't. It's about a notion of love and, what's worse, a clichéd and sentimental notion at that….

[Baldwin's voice] is language neither of experience nor of original literature, but, as I said before, of a mired condition between the two. The truly inarticulate person naturally can't write this way and the truly articulate wouldn't. But if you are a writer and are committed to the kind of fiction that requires you to put your most "passionate" experiences at the forefront of your labors, but lack a language of your own, why you'll borrow it, you'll be, in other words, what is called "literary."… [Baldwin] seems more and more to be out of place in the realm of fiction, where more is needed than to have felt and read. (p. 31)