The novelist Lynne Sharon Schwartz argued that present-tense narration, avoiding temporal context and historical trajectory, oversimplifies, suggesting that nothing “is terribly complex and that understanding, such as it is, can be achieved by naming objects or accumulating data,” and that “all we can ever understand is what can be understood from a glimpse.” This externality and narrowness of its field of vision may be why so much present-tense narrative sounds cool—flat, unemotional, uninvolved. And therefore all rather alike.
