A Sudden Story by Robert Coover, 1987
The magic trick:
Six percent of the words are a variation on ‘sudden’
When I first started learning about short stories, I was amused and somewhat confused to learn that three of the all-time greats were contemporaries in the 1960s and 70s who each had two-syllable last names that started with C and ended with E-R.
Coover, Carver, Cheever. What a strange thing.
So this week we honor this oddity of short story name play. Two stories by Cheever, one today from Coover, and two from Carver.
This particular Coover story is 192 words. Twenty-four of those words start with S. That’s 13 percent, if you were curious.
Also notably, 11 of those words – or 6 percent – are some variation on “sudden.”
And that’s quite a trick on Coover’s part.
The selection:
Once upon a time, suddenly, while it still could, the story began. For the hero, setting forth, there was of course nothing sudden about it, neither about the setting forth, which he’d spent his entire lifetime anticipating, nor about any conceivable endings, which seemed, like the horizon, to be always somewhere else.
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