The novelistic walls of "Just Above My Head" bulge and leak. But the form Baldwin chooses to write in no longer matters. His great and peculiar power is to re-create the maddening halfway house that the black man finds himself in in late-twentieth-century America. Baldwin is a prophet, a master of exhortation. Only weariness makes his voice crack. (p. 219)

Whitney Balliet, "Father and Son," in The New Yorker (© 1979 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.), Vol. LV, No. 41. November 26, 1979, pp. 218-19.