Platitudes by Terry Ellis - Book Report/Review Example

The battling writers slip ever and in a dangerous manner reconcile their literary dispute. This edition of Platitudes was also included “The New Black Aesthetics” which is considered as a groundbreaking essay by Ellis and was published in the journal called Callao (University Press of New England, “Platitudes”). Earle Tyner is 16-year-old black in contemporary New York City. Being bourgeois, he falls in love with Dorothy La Mont, a young Waitress working at her mother’s down-home Harlem dinner.

It was love at first sight for Earle and Dorothy as Tyner takes an after-school job near the restaurant. The friendship between these two teenagers through many weathering and upsetting phases develops and ultimately strengthens into love. These doubly fictional characters of the novel within a novel ultimately help to strengthen the relationship between Dewayne and Ishee. The relations of the novel grow parallel and reconcile together. With Dewayne’s rapidly developing story both the relation end up happily.

Henry Louis Gates Jr has rightly said that the novel is a perfect blend of two great literary genres epistolary and satire. Ellis’s novel is wonderfully comic, smart and sassy, sensitive and intelligent. It has an understanding of his literary precursors and at the same time is skillful management for the display of his own voice and his generation, views Clarence Major. Is the title of the novel really apt? Why did the author use doubly fictional characters in the novel? Is the reconciliation of both the pair in any way connected with each other?