Serial commas: you should use them.

"I only have the one vague memory of Ruth from that early part of our lives.

I'm playing in a sandpit. There are a number of others in the sand with me, it's too crowded and we're getting irritated with each other" (Never Let Me Go, 45).

Now that I've read four chapters, I'm going to talk about Kazuo Ishiguro's style.

With the exception of dialogue, most of the narration is written in compound or complex (or both) sentences. I appreciate that, but I don't appreciate that he doesn't use the Oxford comma. That disturbs the force.¹

The tone of the book has been more conversational than I'm used to. The author isn't afraid of second person point of view, and Kathy refers to herself and the reader as "we" sometimes. It's a better way to connect with the audience, I think. Probably also for that purpose, there are a lot of dead metaphors -- "in hot water" (44), for example.

The excerpt at the beginning of this post confuses me, though. Why introduce a memory as distant and vague and then switch to the present tense? Usually the present tense makes things more tangible and real. So that's a legitimate question I have.

¹I'm seriously serious about this. Just look at the last sentence of the quote at the top of my post -- it almost looks like a comma splice. But noooo, some people just won't use a serial comma. I can sometimes understand it when the list is just of single words, but that sentence would have been ten times easier to read with the Oxford comma. I feel very strongly about this.