I am writing you are reading this now now now

[kate_schaefer]

I'm reading a novel written in present tense. It's a pretty good novel, so I go on reading it. Suddenly, I understand once again why novels shouldn't be written in present tense, and only the shortest and most painfully vivid of short stories should be written in present tense: present tense distances the reader from the things that are happening. It's a convention of how we read. Present tense isn't the story; it's the synopsis, it's The Story So Far. As I'm reading the novel, the presentness of present tense makes everything narrated seem as though it has already happened some time in the past, which makes it seem emotionally distant. The pastness of past tense is as invisible to a reader as he said in a passage of dialogue; we know how it works, so it slides by.

In the particular novel I'm reading, present tense is a good choice. With the number of murders and wars and explosions and beatings and rapes and involuntary operations included in this novel, if it were written in an ordinary narrative style, I'd be so emotionally wrought up that I would have taken the book back to the library unfinished by now. In present tense, it's pushed away from me, pushed away enough that I can see the political outlines of what the author is trying to do, and it's interesting enough to keep me reading.

The novel is Fairyland, by Paul J. McAuley. My younger granddaughter took it out of the library while she was visiting last week; given that the other books she took out were by Anne McCaffrey and McCaffrey-equivalents, I think she was misled by the title and by the fact that one of the main characters is apparently a twelve-year-old girl. She has read some pretty dark fiction -- she likes Garth Nix, for instance -- but I think she'd be bored by this one, and in fact I didn't ever notice her carrying it around.

Comments

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

I am thinking more than somewhat that the best writer in the present tense is Damon Runyon, for the very reasons you are elucidating above.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

I am thinking that you are right, though for somewhat different reasons than heretofore elucidated. Another thing present tense cues for native English speakers is the joke: so this guy walks into a bar. Damon Runyon's present tense tells us that we can expect something funny. There is something else that Runyon does that tells us that there is more going on than the simply funny, but it's been so long since I've read him that I don't remember what it is.