Domestic Drama
Chabon often creates intense little domestic dramas out of family dynamics in his stories. The second half of his collection A Model World and Other Stories commences with “A Little Knife” and then proceeds over the course of four more stories to play out the consequences of the divorce which results from the incessant bickering of the husband and wife in that story. “Ocean Avenue” demonstrates how divorce is like shooting a horse with a broken leg: it may stop the suffering, but it doesn’t fix the broken leg. The story begins after the bickering couple have already parted ways, but the divorce has done nothing to stop the fighting. The most interesting aspect of the wedding that is the centerpiece of “S Angel” isn’t the family dynamics of Sheila and her newly wedded husband, but the domestic drama of her relationship with her cousin, Ira.
Existential Angst
Chabon writes about intense family drama but usually in a way leavened by levity. The dough rises into a story with a soft chewy inside but is surrounded by a crust of existential angst. The domestic dramas as well as the non-domestic dramas are peopled by characters desperately struggling to find some kind of purchase upon the control of their lives. Their grip keeps slipping free due to external conditions and pressures which rip any hold they may actually have away from the controls. The titular object of “The Little Knife” becomes the perfect symbol of every attempt to gain some autonomy over their own existence: it represents a minor victory that comes with a masochistic element of pain and hurt.
Bad Decisions
One could make the argument, of course, that all this existential angst attributed to stories of people who seem to have no control over their lives could be, in fact, be interpreted as just the opposite. The bad turns their lives take or the out of control speeding in the opposite direction they wish to go could, possibly, be attributed entirely to bad decision-making on their part. In this sense, the stories remain an example of existential literature, but reject the angst.
It is Levine, after all, who upon fatefully discovering a book which coincidentally happens to be on the same abstruse subject he is studying who makes the decision—and he alone—to plagiarize. It is Ira’s decision to turn out the freely gift advances of another guest at the wedding of his cousin because it is his cousin he actually desires. “The Little Knife” is constructed precisely for the purpose of inexorably leading to the fateful decision by young Nathan on which the story concludes. Throughout his stories are similar examples making the argument that it is not really external forces guiding the control of the lives characters, but their own impulsive mishandling of moments of decision-making.
