I'm not going to be the right person to give you an answer. Again, even a Pulitzer Prise winning present tense story, which I went into wanting very much to enjoy it (because I wanted to erase Winona Ryder from my image of the story by reading it and having another perspective), was not enough to hold me. Edith Wharton turns a phrase as beautifully as Louis Comfort Tiffany makes a lamp, but I could not get past the tensing of the story. *shrug*
