Just Above My Head is a large work which concerns itself with many things and treats each of them with great reverence. There are no ready-made formulas for drama here. The images and voices of this book come so completely to life that, once submerged, the reader might expect to come across one of the characters or places on the streets of his own world. At the onset one is led to believe that Hall Montana, the omniscient narrator, is about to embark on a self-cleansing confessional rendering of the life and early death of his brother, Arthur. But Baldwin smoothly transforms the novel into a rigorous dissection of the narrator's memory—a study of the individual as affected by experiences as they occur and by memories of those experiences. Hall Montana is a multi-dimensional character in both his moment-to-moment living in the remembered story and in his...