“S Angel”
The opening line of this story situates the storyline of a young man named Ira preparing to attend the wedding ceremony of his cousin, Sheila. As often happens at these rituals, an attraction strikes up between Ira and another guess, an older woman named Carmen. The final image in the story is of Ira and Sheila kissing in a manner decidedly not that of two cousins gently sharing a peck as Ira addresses the bride of another man as “darling.” This irony is intensified by virtue of the fact that these two kissing cousins are neither hillbillies nor members of a royal family.
“Ocean Avenue”
This is a story which treats irony with greater complexity than most of the others. It is, in fact, an ironic subversion of one of the famous most short stories that builds toward an ironic plot twist ever written. O. Henry’s “Gift of the Magi” is a classic Christmas story about a poor husband and wife who attempt to find money to pay for each other’s lone gift only to find that each raised their money by selling the very thing those gifts were intended to exploit. In this case, something of the same sort happens but with a darkly ironic twist instead of a sentimental one: the divorced couple enter into an argument over the fact that he sold her beloved Barbie doll collection for spite while she did the same with his beloved collection of memorabilia related to 1930’s movie star William Powell.
“A Model World”
This is a story which turns on the ironic dimension of pure coincidence. The protagonist is writing a dissertation on the extremely precious and almost completely ignored phenomenon of cloud control and just so happens upon a book published many years earlier which defies all odds by being about the very same subject. The irony of coincidence grows much darker with ill-conceived plan to take a shortcut on his dissertation with the decision to become a plagiarist.
Nathan’s Halloween Costume
“The Halloween Party” is a story that, as indicated, revolves around a Halloween costume party. The irony within the phrase “too clever” is made manifest by the irony of Nathan’s choice for a costume. It is a conceptual costume in which he is supposed to be “a guy in the process of a having a good idea for a costume.” If the standard of judgement for what makes a good costume is the easy ability to recognize what it is supposed to be, then the execution of this idea is a profoundly ironic failure: absolutely nobody recognizes the costume as a representation of that idea.
“The Little Knife”
An emotion knife toss in this story slices through truth and perception at the moment that Nathan Shapiro hears his mother lash out at his father with the declaration, “I’m not going to let you—make me—dishonest anymore!” The narrator flat out declares that Nathan hasn’t a clue what she is talking about while being implicit about the suggestion that Mrs. Shapiro recognizes the ironic duplicity of this accusation even in the middle of saying. The irony is that Mrs. Shapiro hardly needs her husband to program her like a robot to be duplicitous: she goes on to demonstrate a very nicely developed ability to deceive her sons all by herself.
