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Platitudes
As Dewayne Wellington, an experimental novelist, and Isshee Ayam, a radical feminist, collaborate on a novel, they reconcile their differences
183 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1988
3 people are currently reading
344 people want to read
About the author
Trey Ellis
14 books12 followersTrey Ellis (born 1962) is an American novelist, screenwriter, professor, playwright,[1] and essayist. He was born in Washington D.C. and graduated from Hopkins School and Phillips Academy, Andover, before attending Stanford University where he was the editor of the Stanford Chaparral. He is also an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of the Arts at Columbia University.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
September 4, 2007
Definitely one of the most original books I've read in a long time. There's a captivating interaction between two writers attacking the same storyline (boy meets girl, boy loves girl,...) from two different philosophies (postmodernism and African-American feminism). Ellis ends up writing not only from the voices of the two authors, but their literary voices, their characters' voices. If that isn't impressive enough, the voices change as the characters interact with and challenge one another. Seriously fabulous on several levels.
July 10, 2024
Found this at a Habitat ReStore last summer and picked it up because the blurbs (by A. Theroux, Sorrentino, Reed, Major, John A. Williams) are crazy; I haven’t stopped thinking about it all year.
Schizoid country/city plot in the tradition of Cane and Kindred, overlaid with novel-about-a-novel self-consciousness. Black male writer sends chapters of a draft to a black female writer who revises them: his, the story of an upper-middle class teenage computer geek who can’t get laid in New York; hers, the same characters transposed to thirties Georgia (loud fat Christian women, sharecroppers, schoolmarms, racist poor whites). Cane THROUGH Kindred: past and present united in one consciousness: Earle’s coding in the morning and slopping the hogs at night. Octavia Butler wields this as political allegory (the antebellum slave regime never ended, but was diverted into new channels), Ellis as one about the literary market (careerist black authors are rewarded for turning away from the present, implying that black people only come to life under a racial caste system). The woman writer in Platitudes is showered in awards; she’s meant to remind us of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, whom she cites as influences.
Ellis’s novel (1988) was probably written before Beloved was published—various allusions make clear that the Morrison under attack here is the Morrison of Sula and Song of Solomon. This is probably the last moment at which she was criticizable: when Stanley Crouch, who reviewed Beloved unfavorably, died in 2020, a prominent black studies theorist was still nursing a grudge and tweeted (I’m paraphrasing now) “Good riddance.” That novel secured the dominance of historical fiction in the AfAm literary market, cementing a trend that Ellis wrote Platitudes to critique, even if it pushed the historical center of gravity back from the early twentieth century to the slave past. (As Stephen M. Best has observed, the slavery-centered “Atlanticist” school of history that began with Paul Gilroy’s work followed Beloved’s lead. The novel remains the unequivocal master-text of contemporary black studies: witness Christina Sharpe and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson.)
If we think of the most prestigious AfAm novels of the last fifty years—Roots, Kindred, The Color Purple, Beloved, The Middle Passage, The Known World, The Underground Railroad—they are all historical novels, and mostly neo-slave narratives. Even an NBA-winning novel set in the present, like Jesmyn Ward’s Sing Unburied Sing, is about early-twentieth-century ghosts. Which black American wrote historical fiction fifty years before that? Neither Toomer, Larsen, Hurston, Wright, nor Ellison; before Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), which was the first neo-slave narrative, only the second part of Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain approaches historical fiction (as far as I know). I was puzzled by Percival Everett’s Erasure, which assigns to urban fiction the place in the literary market that so clearly belongs to contemporary AfAm historical fiction. When was the last time you picked up a book by Sapphire or Donald Goines? or such a book won a major prize? But Morrison is inescapable: she was very canny to write classroom-sized books, most of them very short and none exceeding 350 pages, which will keep her in circulation a long time.
All this would seem to bear out Kenneth Warren’s claim that “African American literature”—or its main tradition—ceased to exist after the end of the Civil Rights movement. The novels that are now published under that rubric and win awards are historical retreads or Gothic return-of-the-repressed stories. The driving ideology of these novels is that contemporary AfAm life is circumscribed and wholly explainable by the slave past. (Teju Cole’s Open City is an exception that proves the rule: its narrator is a Nigerian immigrant, a black person whose ancestors were not enslaved. Notably, like the mother in Platitudes and the narrator of Erasure, he is an “assimilated” upper-middle class professional.) Ellis’s book wonders: Can there be a contemporary AfAm literature that does not treat slavery or Jim Crow? Is it still meaningfully “black”? Or does “black”—insofar as the literary market is concerned—name a genre, a particular set of concerns dramatized in familiar settings?
Schizoid country/city plot in the tradition of Cane and Kindred, overlaid with novel-about-a-novel self-consciousness. Black male writer sends chapters of a draft to a black female writer who revises them: his, the story of an upper-middle class teenage computer geek who can’t get laid in New York; hers, the same characters transposed to thirties Georgia (loud fat Christian women, sharecroppers, schoolmarms, racist poor whites). Cane THROUGH Kindred: past and present united in one consciousness: Earle’s coding in the morning and slopping the hogs at night. Octavia Butler wields this as political allegory (the antebellum slave regime never ended, but was diverted into new channels), Ellis as one about the literary market (careerist black authors are rewarded for turning away from the present, implying that black people only come to life under a racial caste system). The woman writer in Platitudes is showered in awards; she’s meant to remind us of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, whom she cites as influences.
Ellis’s novel (1988) was probably written before Beloved was published—various allusions make clear that the Morrison under attack here is the Morrison of Sula and Song of Solomon. This is probably the last moment at which she was criticizable: when Stanley Crouch, who reviewed Beloved unfavorably, died in 2020, a prominent black studies theorist was still nursing a grudge and tweeted (I’m paraphrasing now) “Good riddance.” That novel secured the dominance of historical fiction in the AfAm literary market, cementing a trend that Ellis wrote Platitudes to critique, even if it pushed the historical center of gravity back from the early twentieth century to the slave past. (As Stephen M. Best has observed, the slavery-centered “Atlanticist” school of history that began with Paul Gilroy’s work followed Beloved’s lead. The novel remains the unequivocal master-text of contemporary black studies: witness Christina Sharpe and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson.)
If we think of the most prestigious AfAm novels of the last fifty years—Roots, Kindred, The Color Purple, Beloved, The Middle Passage, The Known World, The Underground Railroad—they are all historical novels, and mostly neo-slave narratives. Even an NBA-winning novel set in the present, like Jesmyn Ward’s Sing Unburied Sing, is about early-twentieth-century ghosts. Which black American wrote historical fiction fifty years before that? Neither Toomer, Larsen, Hurston, Wright, nor Ellison; before Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), which was the first neo-slave narrative, only the second part of Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain approaches historical fiction (as far as I know). I was puzzled by Percival Everett’s Erasure, which assigns to urban fiction the place in the literary market that so clearly belongs to contemporary AfAm historical fiction. When was the last time you picked up a book by Sapphire or Donald Goines? or such a book won a major prize? But Morrison is inescapable: she was very canny to write classroom-sized books, most of them very short and none exceeding 350 pages, which will keep her in circulation a long time.
All this would seem to bear out Kenneth Warren’s claim that “African American literature”—or its main tradition—ceased to exist after the end of the Civil Rights movement. The novels that are now published under that rubric and win awards are historical retreads or Gothic return-of-the-repressed stories. The driving ideology of these novels is that contemporary AfAm life is circumscribed and wholly explainable by the slave past. (Teju Cole’s Open City is an exception that proves the rule: its narrator is a Nigerian immigrant, a black person whose ancestors were not enslaved. Notably, like the mother in Platitudes and the narrator of Erasure, he is an “assimilated” upper-middle class professional.) Ellis’s book wonders: Can there be a contemporary AfAm literature that does not treat slavery or Jim Crow? Is it still meaningfully “black”? Or does “black”—insofar as the literary market is concerned—name a genre, a particular set of concerns dramatized in familiar settings?
December 13, 2022
I’ll read anything published by Vintage Contemporaries during the 1980s because I judge a book by its cover. It’s not necessary the dated design that I love as much as how it resonates to a place and time for me. This personality quirk has lead to many great books, such as the post-modern funhouse of Platitudes (read the first edition, not what’s pictured).
April 12, 2023
This was a quick & quite entertaining read, & the scope of its accomplishment grows in stature every time I think of it. Ellis has done a number of the most difficult things one can do in a book, & done them not only successfully but in a way that seems effortless, leaving one fulfilled but largely unaware of the magnitude of his achievement. First of all, the book is hysterical. Ellis fills his tale of young love (or lust) with all the authentic awkwardness, ecstatic highs & devastating lows that such a story deserves, while still keeping the tone light. At the same time, this is a postmodern novel in all its meta-glory, poking fun at the the world of publishing & the adults in it whose flirtatious adventures can be as laughable as their adolescent counterparts', the hyper-seriousness & the slave milieu & dialect that dominates so much African American literature, & even taking the time to parody standardized testing in a fantastic burst of absurdity. Ellis juggles all these sensibilities deftly & expertly, wrapping his high-mindedness in the most deliciously digestible candy coating one could imagine. Many more levels of reading satisfaction than you would expect from such a small package.
February 16, 2012
This is Post-modern with a big capital P. Trey has gone to great lengths to try and cram (or ruin if you will) this book with upside-down bits, things like a whole multiple choice test paper as a character sits an exam (didn’t read) and a complex structure; two fictional writers writing one story which is the novel ‘platitudes and sharing ideas with each other thing. It sort of works only because Trey Ellis can actually write good prose under both these guises and the characters are still sort of likeable. I found the exchanges between the two writers the lowlight, especially the feminist chick who always seems to come in just as things get going…but that’s the annoying thing about po-mo; you’re not meant to get comfortable right? The Black Aesthetic essay at the end is interesting and it is refreshing to read a hip young people’s novel from the black middle class which is what this is 80% of the time. Worth a try if you find it in an op shop somewhere and the above musing don’t put you off..
November 19, 2012
This book is all about sex.
There are lesser themes, too, like the battle between traditional Afro-American writing and postmodernism craziness, the struggle for feminism in literature, and some commentary about how we are constantly inundated with "culture" without realizing its importance or our own values.
But mostly it's about sex. Isshee and Dewayne talk about sex. They make their characters have sex. The metafictional, intertextual, parodic genius of this book is seriously undermined by how much sex is discussed, dissected, and basically just thrown around as a plot tool. I'm not a fan of postmodernism anyway, but this book seemed like a waste of talent.
There are lesser themes, too, like the battle between traditional Afro-American writing and postmodernism craziness, the struggle for feminism in literature, and some commentary about how we are constantly inundated with "culture" without realizing its importance or our own values.
But mostly it's about sex. Isshee and Dewayne talk about sex. They make their characters have sex. The metafictional, intertextual, parodic genius of this book is seriously undermined by how much sex is discussed, dissected, and basically just thrown around as a plot tool. I'm not a fan of postmodernism anyway, but this book seemed like a waste of talent.
December 19, 2007
Boy, I loved this book when I was a kid.
March 9, 2014
I loved this book in a lot of ways, and recommend it - but the first half was too cluttered with writerly tricks for my taste. Another reader might love each and every one of those gambits (excerpts from an imaginary PSAT, for example), but for me it go in the way of the story. I don't need to know Ellis talented, I need to see what he chooses to do with that talent. In the end, though, I cared abou the characters and the story and found myself looking at them much differently by book's end than I did at the beginning.
November 12, 2019
This book is a wonderful example of a story within a story, where a correspondence between and experimental novelist and a womanist novelist evolves into two separate stories, woven around the same characters.
The Black folks in this book are way outside the stereotypical urban Black folks, giving us a rare glimpse into the Black middle-class. Ellis continued this exploration through his (uncreditted) writing of the screenplay for "Inkwell".
The Black folks in this book are way outside the stereotypical urban Black folks, giving us a rare glimpse into the Black middle-class. Ellis continued this exploration through his (uncreditted) writing of the screenplay for "Inkwell".
January 31, 2009
A friend gave me this book because she knew it was so different from what I normally read. Needless to say, I didn't love it. Didn't even like it, really. It was too post-modern and self-indulgent to enjoy.
March 31, 2016
Fun to go back to this after several years. Ellis--similar to other sharp satirists I admire like Mat Johnson and Percival Everett--explodes our "stable" understandings of race in America with a whirlwind, dialogical text that tends always toward outlandishly funny and aesthetically provocative.
Read
May 14, 2012Great
April 10, 2014
Read for a class.
December 1, 2016
Somehow both a novel take on postmodern and African-American contemporary lit and also v light and funny. Will be reading more Ellis
February 19, 2019
This novel is an example of what Raymond Federman calls “critifiction,” or fiction that has embedded within it its own criticism (as in, the author critiques the work and that critique is a part of the work). Critifiction, by being self-aware and -reflexive, by foregrounding the text and treating it as the only reality to critique, by aestheticizing post-structuralism, is straight-up postmodern. Now, the line on postmodernism as expressed in literature, like it or not, is that it is, among other things, as a consequence of recognizing language as the medium of reality, apolitical. Postmodernism – as materialist-Marxists will gladly scream at you – is irresponsible and dangerous precisely because it neglects the political realm (and does so because politics is just another Lyotardian narrative ripe for deconstruction blah blah blah). And okay so since postmodern lit. only engages social issues in order to ironize them postmodernism is a movement populated almost wholly by white male authors whose works can be read without political positions being read into them. This in part fashions the divide separating literary high fiction that orbits aesthetics and genre low fiction that claws through real-world issues. Trey Ellis knows all of this. And, knowing this, he writes Platitudes, a postmodern novel that simultaneously performs a critique of itself as a work of postmodern literature by a black author. This is about an author, Dewayne Wellington, trying to write a novel, Platitudes, about Earle Tyner, a black computer nerd desperately in love with Janie Rosebloom, a pretty girl from his private school in the Upper West Side. After a few pages Dewayne addresses the reader, telling you that the whole book thing isn’t really working out and so is putting an ad in the paper for someone to write to him and give him some help on how to proceed. Enter Isshee Ayam, a black feminist author of some renown who damns Dewayne’s work for being hopelessly misogynistic and postmodern (read: apolitical). In an attempt to redirect what she sees as Dewayne’s wayward plot she takes his characters and sets them in Depression-era rural Georgia. So, using Isshee’s chapters as loose guides, Dewayne continues Platitudes, which becomes increasingly about Dewayne’s relationship with Isshee under the guise of Earle’s relationship with Janie. What you’re reading, then, is Dewayne’s chapters, Isshee’s letters to Dewayne, Dewayne’s letters to Isshee, and Isshee’s chapters refashioning Dewayne’s characters. And all along the way Dewayne’s style develops into ever more stylistically pyrotechnic postmodern prose (kind of like the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter from Ulysses), and his characters remark on black life in postmodern America without violating whatever pretend line divides aesthetic from political fiction. This is the genius of Ellis’ work (and I don’t use the g-word lightly), he reintroduces politics to postmodernism, and shows how, amid all the language games of pomo fiction, a literary author can address social issues without ironizing them out of all recognition. Ellis himself calls this (or called this in 1988) the “New Black Aesthetic” of “cultural mulattoes,” and while we’ve come some way since then, including a drastic shift away from postmodernism itself, (and probably also shrink from the term “cultural mulatto”), this remains a brilliant novel that should be better known than it is.
September 6, 2024
3.5 stars.
Thought about rating this a tad lower, because I wasn’t always actively having fun with the reading experience, though it’s interesting and paced quickly enough that it never got actively boring. Some of the longer experimental parts—several pages of questions from Earle’s PSAT exam, for example, along with invented menus and lyrics and bits of radio or TV caught briefly while channel surfing—were clever but got a bit tiresome after some time. But I really admire what Trey Ellis is doing here, and I like the book more in retrospect, especially thanks to an ending that really ties everything together.
The premise is right up my alley: two writers essentially trade off writing chapters of a new novel, the interplay of their styles and philosophies leading to a romance between the two of them. (My roommate initially recommended this to me after I told him the plot of my novel.) And it’s pretty fascinating to catch all the ways Dewayne Wellington’s writing starts to shift and mature after he learns from Isshee Ayam’s versions. I enjoyed observing certain problems with Dewayne’s style (the constant objectification of women and general reliance on stereotypes) and Isshee’s style (the sometimes-overemphasis on radical feminism and transformation of the narrative into a more traditional “Afro-American glory story”), then watching them point out those flaws and move forward to create something better.
The vast majority of the actual body of Platitudes is the book-within-the-book, also called Platitudes. And there’s plenty to unpack in those chapters—Earle’s jealousy of hypermasculine men, for example, and how that envy relates to his race. But maybe because Earle and Dorothy’s story feels so fictional within the context of the book, and because they’re often intentionally written as stereotypical and symbolic, I never truly grew to think of them as compelling or likable characters in their own right. I think the ideal version of this book would work on both levels, with the dual stories echoing each other while functioning independently. But for me, the Earle and Dorothy stuff never totally captivated me.
Maybe the issue is that I was just more interested in the background story, the “real” narrative: Dewayne and Isshee’s romance, which feels much more earnest and real, less hamstrung by the meta elements. I enjoy their repartee, and their more explicit intellectual discussions about how Black people should be portrayed in fiction. I wanted to see more of their love story, and more of their conversation.
But as I alluded to earlier, the ending is perfect.
Thought about rating this a tad lower, because I wasn’t always actively having fun with the reading experience, though it’s interesting and paced quickly enough that it never got actively boring. Some of the longer experimental parts—several pages of questions from Earle’s PSAT exam, for example, along with invented menus and lyrics and bits of radio or TV caught briefly while channel surfing—were clever but got a bit tiresome after some time. But I really admire what Trey Ellis is doing here, and I like the book more in retrospect, especially thanks to an ending that really ties everything together.
The premise is right up my alley: two writers essentially trade off writing chapters of a new novel, the interplay of their styles and philosophies leading to a romance between the two of them. (My roommate initially recommended this to me after I told him the plot of my novel.) And it’s pretty fascinating to catch all the ways Dewayne Wellington’s writing starts to shift and mature after he learns from Isshee Ayam’s versions. I enjoyed observing certain problems with Dewayne’s style (the constant objectification of women and general reliance on stereotypes) and Isshee’s style (the sometimes-overemphasis on radical feminism and transformation of the narrative into a more traditional “Afro-American glory story”), then watching them point out those flaws and move forward to create something better.
The vast majority of the actual body of Platitudes is the book-within-the-book, also called Platitudes. And there’s plenty to unpack in those chapters—Earle’s jealousy of hypermasculine men, for example, and how that envy relates to his race. But maybe because Earle and Dorothy’s story feels so fictional within the context of the book, and because they’re often intentionally written as stereotypical and symbolic, I never truly grew to think of them as compelling or likable characters in their own right. I think the ideal version of this book would work on both levels, with the dual stories echoing each other while functioning independently. But for me, the Earle and Dorothy stuff never totally captivated me.
Maybe the issue is that I was just more interested in the background story, the “real” narrative: Dewayne and Isshee’s romance, which feels much more earnest and real, less hamstrung by the meta elements. I enjoy their repartee, and their more explicit intellectual discussions about how Black people should be portrayed in fiction. I wanted to see more of their love story, and more of their conversation.
But as I alluded to earlier, the ending is perfect.
November 14, 2019
This was definitely one of those novels you really just need to get a good grasp of or you wont be able to enjoy it. Going into it, I really thought I was going to hate it, but after I started to understand what was going on, I really liked the execution of this quite complicated read. I definitely recommend it to anyone who is interested in African-American/ Multicultural Lit. Studies. I definitely don't recommend it so anyone who just wants a read to clear their mind.
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January 15, 2022Structurally, it’s like that one Wire live album they did where half of it is them playing their songs and the other half feels like anti-music. I’m not even sure I can explain what I mean by that, but I loved this one. Ellis gives us three storylines - all worth becoming invested in. A little confusing at first, but rewarding by the end.
April 21, 2017
+1 star for usage of "fuddy-duddy"
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July 17, 2018This was the first book we read in a class on recent trends in Black culture in the U.S.--"The Post-Soul Aesthetic." (How's that for a course title?) It tries REAL hard to be postmodern. But this actually works out pretty well a lot of the time with some pretty funny and brilliant bits. Ultimately it gets a little bit lost in all the levels of metafiction, but still a really interesting read.
One of the main characters is a teenage boy, which I guess why the narration is so sex-obsessed. . . I realize this is supposed to be an important motif and blah blah blah, but it got a little old for me.
One of the main characters is a teenage boy, which I guess why the narration is so sex-obsessed. . . I realize this is supposed to be an important motif and blah blah blah, but it got a little old for me.
Read
September 13, 2018how is it you ask that a novel blurbed by ishmael reed, clarence major, alexander theroux, and gilbert f'ing sorrentino hasn't utterly blown up this here website? welllllllllllll here's the thing... despite how delighted and inspired i was by the melange of restaurant menus & lit parody & lists & movie trailers & standardized tests at hand here, the book sadly also kinda exemplifies everything toxic about nerd culture, w/ our protagonist earle & his friends desperate to get laid & yet deriding girls all over the place as "cows" and "prudes" and expressing sentiments like "why can't [i] just settle for a tubby acnehead"... which, i haven't even mentioned the bit where earle walks in on the love interest having sex with a male model bc she's home sick and he's bringing her chicken soup (lmao). so yeah. the metafictional elements = incredible; the proto-reddit-"nice-guy" posturing, not so much
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews