Review: Just Above My Head

Just Above My Head by James Baldwin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” is one of the three or four greatest short stories I know. I’ve read it at least a dozen times, often to prepare for teaching it, and I have teared up almost every time. It takes a perspective “we” can almost know – a middle-aged African-American high school teacher who’s served in the army – and has him serve as “our” guide to the great artistry and deep hurt of his jazz-inspired brother. The story somehow collapses the whole of the brothers’ lives – there’s a line about our narrator catching Sonny when he takes his first steps – and even echoes the deeper experience of African-Americans as a whole. And it also may be the greatest primer to the possibilities of jazz that anyone has ever written.

I’ve put “we” and “our” in quotes because It’s a deep question when it comes to defining who it is Baldwin is writing for. I think “Sonny’s Blues” is powerful in part because it’s a supposedly marginal figure who’s able to make his story accessible to a generic – read “white” as near synonym – audience. Of course, it’s more than that as well, and part of its power is the way it ultimately makes me realize how wide the world of perspective is beyond my own.

This novel comes more than two decades later, but I think “Sonny’s Blues” informs it. The novel begins as almost a reprise, with our narrator, Hall, writing of how he learned of his brother Arthur’s death. (“Sonny’s Blues” begins with the narrator learning of Sonny’s arrest for heroin possession.) Then it spends a good chunk of the first “book” exploring how they came to be estranged and how they came to understand one another.

This novel is, in its way, even more ambitious, though. It deals not just with the African-American experience and the power of music (Arthur is a successful gospel singer) but also the civil rights struggle, sexual abuse, and homosexuality as an emerging cultural possibility.

This is an important book, as is anything Baldwin ever wrote. And, since it is Baldwin, there are moments of soaring prose. (Consider two quick gems: “Music does not begin as a song. It can become a song, but it begins as a cry.” Or “Our suffering is our bridge to one another. Everyone must cross this bridge.”) And, given that this is written in 1979, it’s an important landmark in naming the LGBT experience as authentic to the American experience as a whole.

This is not, in the end, though, a great novel. Its ambition weighs it down throughout, and it seems often to be reminding us of all it’s trying to do. I often found myself admiring some of the characters’ insights, but I seldom found myself caught up in the story itself. I felt good about being someone who was reading it, but I didn’t enjoy the reading as I would have hoped.

For starters, the dialogue here is clumsy. Characters don’t talk to each other so much as make speeches in front of one another. (The grand quality of many of them reminds me of the social realism novels of the 1930s, of something James Farrell might have written in the years before he discovered James Joyce.) Or, when they aren’t, they’re moving the narrative forward in awkward ways, introducing each other and explaining things in dialogue that we could get more efficiently through other narrative forms.

And then there are the explicit sex scenes. I have no problem with the content, but they often feel almost clinical, like we are being asked to acknowledge that, yes, human animals experience arousal and lust of this sort. They make me think a little of the great Monty Python skit where, for a sex education class, John Cleese, as a professor, invites his wife into the room, and they proceed to go at it on a desk. Then he interrupts himself occasionally to scold the students for laughing. Maybe nothing about this books says “ ’70s novel” more than that, but it feels dated and awkward. It’s great that he’s showing that we should be no more shocked by gay sex than by hetero, but neither comes across as authentic.

But the biggest problem I have is with the fundamental narrative structure. Our narrator is Hall, but it seems as if Baldwin is bored with him. (There’s even a part, at the start of the final book, when Hall asks himself why he is trying to tell this story – a telling bit of uncertainty – and he concludes that it’s to make sense of Arthur’s story more than his own.) Most of this story, then, concerns Arthur – or others like their neighbor and some-time lover Julia – often in private moments Hall could never have known.

In other words, Hall is a narrator telling us about events he can’t possibly have seen, which undermines him as a narrator/character.

Narrative technology has come a long way in the forty years since this came out. I think of what I like to call the rhizomatic novel where we get a series of only tangentially connected stories in a single volume, stories that, in conversation, tell more than any one figure could know. Or we get the proliferation of excellent short story cycles that have come out since. Instead, this seems like a novel trapped in a form of story-telling that can’t quite encompass it.

There is greatness here. I suspect there’s greatness in anything Baldwin ever put down on paper. But this work as a whole doesn’t come together as it might. I am glad I read it, but I am also glad I am finished reading it.


View all my reviews