No one today excels James Baldwin in the writing of invective. His art is nourished and sustained by an unquenchable rage. He is, essentially, a prophet, with a prophet's ear for the cadences of desolation. Those cadences inform his long new novel, Just Above My Head, which is principally concerned with the life and times of a gospel singer named Arthur Montana….
Arthur is a homosexual, like his creator. He finds himself doubly alienated from American society: for most of his short life he is afraid to tell even his closest friends about his feelings. He is something of an emotional cripple…. Yet the nature of Arthur's despair is never seriously examined, although it is constantly referred to. His trip to the abyss is disposed of in a couple of paragraphs. Baldwin rages, and rhapsodizes, and editorializes, but seldom gets down to the proper business of the novelist, which is to establish character and incident. The reader is told about Arthur's misery, and is indeed lectured at on the subject, but that gigantic sorrow remains undramatized—except, to be fair, when Arthur is singing. Baldwin, not surprisingly, writes superbly when his people are making music.
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