» wish that I could push a button

I'm re-reading Michael Frayn's Headlong, a mischevious and enjoyable story about a man who becomes obsessed with his land-rich neighbour's art collection. Is is a Brue(h)el?, he wonders. And the book is richly in the present tense, even as the action shifts from the present to the recent past to the more-distant past: Frayn artfully uses simple language to build his story. By contrast, Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent is another problem altogether, a confusingly-written legal thriller which takes place in an uncomfortable present tense. The verbs switch sometimes into the perfect, but overall the narrative has little sense of its place in the time of the book. And the story, too, is disappointing: the vocabulary feels stilted, overly-researched, pretentious. Not the legal jargon, but the characters' language. The author's attempts at vernacular amount to little more than stereotypical jive-talkin' (without the ultimate apostrophe, even: jive talkin he would have written).