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Well, I guess most narratives are written in what we think of as the past tense, (though Käte Hamburger - a literary theorist - reckons it isn't really past tense but what she calls the "epic preterite"). Some books written in the present tense can be very successful - After Dark by Haruki Murakami comes to mind as the most recent that I've read. Reading a narrative in the present tense can have some quite interesting cognitive effects - not least of which is that when we read a "normal", past tense or whatever you want to call it, novel the narrator is narrating events that he/she knows about - in a sense they "know" more than we as the reader does, and have made decisions about which bits of what happened they are going to tell us about. But when a narrative is in the present tense the narrator doesn't have this privileged position - the effect can be much more like watching a film, with the events unfolding as we encounter them, there is on one predigesting the events and the recounting them.
Having said all that, just because present tense narratives are relatively unfamiliar to us it can take some time to settle into them. And of course, they may be badly written, which doesn't help.
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