Justification for non-justification?

I was immediately struck by the sections of this novel being named for verb tenses. I wasn’t quite sure to make of it as I was reading the book and after more consideration I’m still not quite sure. To summarize them:

Past – the dead girl’s ghost

Present Historic – the homeless girl

Future Conditional – the hotel worker

Perfect – the journalist

Future in the Past – the dead girl’s sister

Present – the unidentified, omnipotent(?) narrator

So, with the exception of the hotel worker and the narrator, we are dealing exclusively with past tenses. Beginning at the beginning, they seem to start off making sense to me: the dead girl is dead and gone: simple past; she’s even started to fade from this world as is shown with her gradual loss of language which seems to have a strong connection to the world of the book as shown through the labeling of the sections. The present historic for the homeless girl can potentially be explained by viewing her as not having a future, or even a worthwhile present (because she is an outsider to the capitalist system?) and if we view her events as having already played themselves out but being told in the present tense in order to give them an artificial relevance perhaps this section is making that commentary.

The wheels start to come off it a bit for me here, but maybe that’s part of the intention. The journalist’s section is labeled “Perfect” but it’s not. The idea of perfect implies completion and the section title itself is not even complete – I’m not sure what else there is to say about that section.

The sister’s section title seems to fit a bit better, she’s stuck in a past, or at least longing for one, in which there is still a future for her sister/family/self. She wants to be there but it is gone. The jarring change in the voice of this section gives evidence that she is a bit unhinged and not quite in the now.

The final section, “Present” is, I suppose the heavy-handed delivery of the point of the book which might be that life marches on.

The hotel worker’s section title implies something that might happen, maybe that her illness and recovery is something that could happen or maybe her actions toward the homeless girl might give her a chance to re-enter mainstream society, if only for a short while. I’m not sure what to make of this one either but I do think it’s significant that it is the only future tense used as a section heading.

The other thing that I noticed about the formatting of the book is that it is not justified. This might be making some comment on it not being able to be neatly fit within boundaries. I felt that this was somehow connected to the section titles playing with expectations since, after all, they don’t actually refer to the tense that each section is written in.