A review by digitalcage
Just Above My Head by James Baldwin

5.0

Even though Baldwin's final novel, [b:Just Above My Head|38457|Just Above My Head|James Baldwin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403171798l/38457._SY75_.jpg|248225], was completed more than twenty-five years after his first, [b:Go Tell It on the Mountain|17143|Go Tell It on the Mountain|James Baldwin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348424233l/17143._SY75_.jpg|1027995], both novels tell the story of a young, gay, black man growing up in a religious and musical community in Harlem. It's substantial enough material to merit treatment in two separate novels, and Baldwin allows the full measure of his intervening years as a writer, public intellectual and citizen of the world to inform his latter approach. So where [b:Go Tell It on the Mountain|17143|Go Tell It on the Mountain|James Baldwin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348424233l/17143._SY75_.jpg|1027995] was fiery and angry, a sermon shouted into the sanctuary, [b:Just Above My Head|38457|Just Above My Head|James Baldwin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403171798l/38457._SY75_.jpg|248225] is warm and sprawling in an unabashedly novelistic way, confident in its scope and embrace of uncertainty. Characters, even vile ones, are written with a generosity of heart that is pierced through with the flashes of righteous anger that are the hallmarks of Baldwin's social criticism. Everyone in this novel is loved by Baldwin, and no one is spared the full extent of his penetrating gaze--which might be the ultimate act of love. The impenetrable mystery of other hearts and minds is transcended, startlingly, by Baldwin shifting the narrative voice from Hall Montana, brother of the novel's object of focus, the famous fictional gospel singer Arthur Montana, by entering, recreating and narrating parts of Arthur's and other characters/ inner lives that are far removed and actually unknowable by Hall himself. Grief, bafflement, abuse and inhumanity are the incidents that most often drive the novel forward, but love--a profound, messy kind of love--fills every line and shapes [b:Just Above My Head|38457|Just Above My Head|James Baldwin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403171798l/38457._SY75_.jpg|248225] into a novel of shimmering wonder and exultant fellowship. If [b:Just Above My Head|38457|Just Above My Head|James Baldwin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403171798l/38457._SY75_.jpg|248225] was a novel of departure--the book Baldwin famously said he needed to first write if he was ever going to be able to write anything else--then [b:Just Above My Head|38457|Just Above My Head|James Baldwin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403171798l/38457._SY75_.jpg|248225] is a novel of arrival, the one Baldwin never could have written if he hadn't written everything else. Among its many wonders, it is a summary by of one of America's greatest writers of his imagination, lyricism, and the love and bafflement he cannot help but feel for all of humankind.