The Little Knife
The title object of “The Little Knife” is just that: a small, well-designed, foreign-made kitchen utensil. It is the subject of what turns out to be the definitive argument out of several between Nathan’s mother and father on their last vacation together as a family. He secretly purloins the knife in violation of his mother’s volatile rejection of her husband’s seemingly mundane suggestion that since the likes it so much she should take it home. The knife becomes the symbol of Nathan’s newfound assertion of power and control over his life. He is, in effect, the personification of a little knife.
Carmen’s Purse
The opening story has Ira attending his cousin Sheila’s wedding at which Sheila tries to set up Ira with her older friend Carmen. Carmen has been through some things, let’s say. Physically appealing enough to trigger an interest in the Ira who claims to have never known love, he ultimately is moved to put the kibosh on those plans after getting an unintended opportunity to peek at the contents of purse. The combination of wadded tissues, an airline gin bottle, black jellybeans, two bottles of prescription meds, part of a chocolate bar and various and assort other sundries, Ira concludes the woman is a train wreck and decides to take a pass. Out of context, the purse might seem to be a symbol of how it is our disposable possessions which really carry the power to tell the truth about us to others, but within the context of Ira’s vain search for love—and the shocking climax of where he finds it—the purse really seems more a symbol of the lengths some people go to reject the opportunity to test the waters of finding love.
Nathan’s Halloween Costume
The second half of this book is like a collection-within-a-collection featuring six interconnected but distinctly separate stories charting the course of the divorce of the Shapiros and its aftermath and effect on their kids, particularly young Nathan. Having aged a little since the first story, Nathan’s goal in “The Halloween Party” is finally confessing his love to Eleanor Parnell, older woman friend of his mother. He goes conceptual in his choice for a costume which is defined by light bulb suspended over his head: “a guy in the process of having a good idea for a costume.” The symbolism of this concept can be applied liberally over the breath of the stories throughout both halves of the book as they almost all tell tales of people who seem to be stuck at some point in a process of what seemed like a good idea at one time.
Playthings for the Unusual Child
The two men who run Other Worlds, Inc. own a business that is much like Nathan’s costume: conceptual. They buy junk others couldn’t sell in bulk at auctions and figure out a way to repurpose them into high-end entertainment items to be sold on a fat margin at museum gift shops and non-warehouse toy stores. They are two of the few characters in the stories who moved past the stage of looking for a good idea to actually finding it, but there is a downside. The business is symbolic of their perspective toward the rest of the world: everything can be repurposed, even other people.
The Matchbox Car Story
A “game” is being played at a dinner party hosted by a professor and his wife. The game has a popular pastime of one of the guests, a famous theater guru currently serving as a guest professor at the School of Drama where the professor teaches full time. The game is very simple. Just answer the guru’s single query: “What is the worst thing you have ever done in your whole, entire life?” What is problematic is that the narrator and his friend are also guests and the narrator is having an affair with the professor’s wife while his friend is in the midst of plagiarizing the dissertation he must soon submit. The narrator claims to answer truthfully by telling a story from his childhood about willfully vandalizing the Matchbox toy car a friend of his had just received as a gift. The evasion toward a story that none of the other guests believe is true is symbolic of the patterns of deception and/or distractions which permeates throughout the collection.
