Tiny Ewell on the bus: no jolly irony

The narrator opens by disclaiming the easy authorial irony — the small man named Tiny — before anyone can savor it: "There is no jolly irony." It is a tiny meta-move, the narration declining to be the Dickensian ironist and insisting the name is just literally, single-entendre true (he is tiny). The book flags its own wariness of cheap irony at the level of a character's name, refusing to wink where a lazier register would. (The detox / DTs / Happy Slippers content is addiction-recovery's, NOT built; landed here is the irony-disclaimer micro.)