Some Tense Choices:
To Be or Not to Be

117}THIS GUY WALKS UP TO ME:
PAST VS. PRESENT TENSE

If you listen closely to people telling anecdotes at social gatherings or to stand-up comedians telling stories (that turn into jokes), you’ll notice that often they’ll start telling their tale in the past tense (“Last week I was rolling my cart down frozen food aisle at the supermarket”) and then—so seamlessly that if you weren’t listening closely, you probably wouldn’t notice—they switch to present tense (“when all of a sudden this lady walks up to me”). Their stories are told this way for two reasons: (1) it comes naturally, and (2) the stories seem to work better.

Writing stories on paper is a far less spontaneous process than telling them out loud, and choices—even about such matters as tense—are often made with great deliberation. Still, the stand-up comic and the raconteur have something to teach us: Whether they realize it or not, they’re getting the best of both worlds.

By starting their stories out with the past tense, they plant a seed of expectation. The words “Last week” or “The other day” tell us we’re in for a story, one that occurred at some point in the past, whose outcome is already well known—but only to the teller. His knowledge shapes and colors his story, and allows him a degree of perspective. In the first line of The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford announces that what follows is “the saddest story ever heard.”

The present tense, on the other hand, is all immediacy, no perspective; it allows for no reflections and no foreshadowing (“little did Susan expect”). As with plays and movies, with the present tense the past is gone and the future doesn’t exist; everything is happening now. The point when the raconteur and the stand-up comedian switch to present tense is usually when the story shifts into active or dramatic mode. Suddenly we’re no longer simply listening to a tale being told; we watch it flicker and unfold on the mind’s movie screen.

Like the raconteur and the comedian, fiction writers have been known to slide from tense to tense to great effect, as John Rechy does incessantly in City of Night, his first novel, and as Kerouac does occasionally in On the Road:

I bought my ticket and was waiting for the L.A. bus when all of a sudden I saw the cutest little Mexican girl in slacks come cutting across my sight. She was in one of the buses that had just pulled in with a sigh of airbrakes and was discharging passengers for a rest stop. … A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too big world. “Los Angeles coach now loading in door two,” says the announcer and I get on. I saw her sitting alone. …[Italics added.]

Kerouac slides so deftly from past to present and back again that we barely notice. This sort of trick requires not just a good, but a great, ear.

Thomas Harris embeds present-tense descriptions of Hannibal Lecter into his past-tense novel, The Silence of the Lambs. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (the narrator of the novel) slides from past tense to present tense when describing episodes charged with emotional significance, as if experiencing them anew with us. In The Constant Gardener, John le Carré uses tenses counterintuitively, conveying present action using past tense and flashbacks using the present tense.

More typically, novels are set in one tense or the other. And though past tense has always been the gold standard of storytelling, Joyce Cary, John Updike, and Chuck Palahniuk (among others) have written entire novels—and long ones—in the present tense. Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (eight-hundred pages) begins:

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

It is too late. The evacuation still proceeds, but it’s all theater. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it’s night. He’s afraid of the way the glass will fall—soon—it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.

The sense of immediacy in this opening passage and the suspense conveyed by it are enough to set even a jaded reader’s teeth on edge. Reading it feels like sitting in a dentist’s chair, watching him lay out his shiny implements, with that first now as menacing as any syringe or drill: This may hurt a bit.

But while successful long works have been written in the present tense, there’s still the danger of wearing readers out—a danger not faced by the stand-up comic or the raconteur, or by movies. Unlike written stories, which demand constant interaction from their readers, movies do all the work for us, allowing us to be totally passive. Reading a novel written in the present tense can feel like reading a movie—or like reading the screenplay of a movie, where we have to direct, design sets and costumes, and play all the parts: a lot of work. And unless the “movie” is action-packed, the blow-by-blow assault of subtle thoughts and microscopic gestures may feel, as one blogger describes her experience of Helen Dunmore’s The Siege, like “being hit repeatedly over the head with a teaspoon.”

But the biggest problem with present tense is that it greatly restricts the use of flashbacks, flash-forwards, backstory, and any other matter not pertaining to the present action. While the choice of tense is highly personal and subjective, if a novel isn’t working in present tense, I gently suggest that the author consider switching to past tense, where the element of suspense is readily implied.

Similarly, first-person narration is difficult to sustain for the length of a novel. The combination of first-person/present-tense narration in a novel is therefore especially challenging, like doing the Tour de France on a unicycle.

118}YOU TALKIN’ TO ME?
SECOND THOUGHTS ON SECOND PERSON

I have before me the story of a bitterly divided brother and sister, forced together on the occasion of their grandmother’s death, written using the second person limited point of view. In saying “you,” the author appears to point to me, her reader; but since the narrator is evidently addressing Frank (the protagonist’s brother), the strategy endows me with Frank’s actions and traits, and its success depends upon this reader’s willingness to be pressed into service as a participant in the story.

The chief advantage of second person is its novelty—although, since Jay McInerney used it in Bright Lights, Big City (his first novel and a huge commercial success), it has been worn to a frazzle.

Second-person narrative is most often used with humorous— or anyway, less-than-tragic—material. Lorrie Moore made heavy use of it in her short story collection, Self-Help.

Meet in expensive beige raincoats, on a pea-soupy night. Like a detective movie. First, stand in front of Florsheim’s Fifty-seventh Street window, press your face close to the glass, watch the fake velvet Hummels inside revolving around the wing tips; some white shoes, like your father wears, are propped up with garlands on a small mound of chemical snow. All the stores have closed. You can see your breath on the glass. Draw a peace sign. You are waiting for a bus.⁵⁶

But there’ve been notable exceptions, including Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Haunted Mind,” one of the first short stories to use second person, and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, one of the first novels.

Still, to me there’s something intrinsically funny about any narrative that casts me as its hero. Imagine yourself (if you can) cast in the role of Robert Jordan in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, or as Humbert Humbert. Having never blown up bridges during the Spanish Civil War or committed statutory rape, you may feel similarly miscast.

But even when a narrator’s role makes lesser demands on me, presented with a story in the second person I find myself crossing my arms defiantly as I read, “You hide your sister’s cigarettes under the couch pillow,” and saying under my breath, “No I don’t. I don’t even smoke!” This defensiveness doesn’t always make for a healthy reader/writer relationship, and may even lose you some readers.