Swollen (655 pages), meandering, awkwardly colloquial, and pretentiously elevated by turns, [Just Above My Head] 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...