Coincidence often gives fiction its chance to mean something.
Over at Lit Hub, in an excerpt from her new book The Kite and the String, Alice Mattison walks us through brilliantly executed coincidences in E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End, Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” and Andre Dubus’s story “The Winter Father.” She argues for action and resonance, an alignment of a character’s inner life with outside eventfulness.
