It is Baldwin's sentimental and poorly argued attempt to present homosexuality as some form of superior erotic enlightenment that continually slackens the power of Just Above My Head. The sentimentality results from a tendency to overstatement, pretension, and pomposity, as well as the creation of situations and responses the sole function of which is to prove the degradation of black people at the behest of racism and sexual convention. The degradation is wrought with existential cliches to demonstrate that suffering and alienation form the high road to awareness, and that he or she who is most painfully alienated is somehow most human and, as Robert Bone once angrily pointed out [see excerpt above], stands as guiding priest or priestess at the intersections of human ambivalence….

Baldwin loves the black church for the depth of its music and its great feeling of collective exaltation, but hates it for its provincialism; he seeks in his writing to combine the language of the Bible and of his church people with that of Henry James and the hip argots of the streets and jazz. The results are frequently ineffectual especially when the characters are made to vent long monologues about love and danger, nakedness and loneliness, outrage and self-pity—the subjects Baldwin belabors most. Then his lecture voice takes over and everybody sounds about the same.

Yet there are many instances when the literary power that informed those fine and virtuosic essays in Notes of a Native Son comes through, and we are made ruefully aware of the struggle this writer is waging with his attempts to define his own life choices in a grand and heroic light. Writing of Joel, who incestuously rapes his daughter after his wife dies (the fashionable post-Bigger neo-brute is burned again in literary effigy), Baldwin's language moves from the Bible to the blues with actual eloquence…. But this same writer can also observe: "Love is a two-way street." You see the problem….

Hall is much of the novel's problem. He is given to insubstantial observations about racial history, an ongoing series of sermons and homilies about the terrors and responsibilities of love, an irritating bitchiness, and claims of moral superiority to white people more often stated in a self-congratulatory fashion than proved. Then his sugary-salty Sunday school compassion takes on the tone of a professional mourner trying to be hip. Too, he is a very unconvincing heterosexual (with a few homosexual romances in the service): his descriptions of experiences with women are clay-pigeon fantasies glazed with effusive adjectives. The narrative can be effective, however, when Baldwin backs off from creating intensity by merely piling up words, and depicts situations he knows or imagines with clean authority. (p. 39)

Although Arthur is basically a very strong character, Hall and the others so swoon and moan over his difficulties that the reader is given little chance to feel anything at all. When this is not the problem, Arthur's language, filtered through Hall, so often changes at the demands of the writer that he sometimes seems no more than a literary dummy, ever ready to mouth speeches about dread and romantic terror. Yet, again, there are moments when the purple shrouds are removed, and some of Arthur's adult life carries authenticity. Arthur's brief romance with a Frenchman also seems authentic—though it, too, occasionally succumbs to sentimentality, and there is a fraudulent conversation in which Arthur lectures his lover on the horrors of being black in Western civilization.

Elsewhere in Just Above My Head are some of the finest scenes in recent American literature, some so precise and easefully evocative that one hopes Baldwin finds a strong and sympathetic editor next time out. Baldwin communicates superb insights about the buying of Christmas presents for loved ones and near-strangers, then artfully undercuts both the affection and the ambivalence with a finely orchestrated confrontation between Hall and a white worker in an expensive clothing store. Their animosity and suspicion are as charged as the best of [Harold] Pinter or [jazz musician] Thelonious Monk….

Baldwin expands the territory of the black novel as he details the ambivalence of black people faced with the privileged dungeon of Madison Avenue success, and realistically—though too briefly—portrays black poverty-program opportunists. The irony, however, is that those are the people who benefit most from the kind of guilt Baldwin so continuously tries to impose on his white readers.

I think the guilt is all a waste of time, for guilt is not what black people need to inspire in white people, if, in fact, black people need to inspire anything at all in white people. What is needed is a breaking away by writers, readers, and various speakers for the black cause from simplistic, pot-boiled ideas, from the howling propaganda that is the Madison Avenue version of politics and social comment….

[I do not] believe that the world of a Nicky Barnes or a Richard Pryor is more real or significant than that of an Adam Powell, a Romare Bearden, a Max Roach, or a Donald McHenry. That kind of thinking can lead to an irresponsible snobbery wherein one could believe that black people, women, or homosexuals will, by some grace of special suffering, burst through the paper and metal chains that repress them and change our country for the better. Oh, it will be changed, and probably for the better—but not because the condition of the outsider guarantees enlightment. No condition guarantees that, which is something James Baldwin knows quite well. That he will ever successfully tell us this again, as he did so wonderfully in Go Tell It On The Mountain, is something we should hope for. Between a third and a half of Just Above My Head proves it is still possible. (p. 42)