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It can be a device to breathe more life into a story, in particular to evoke the feeling of witnessing events or action. Note that if you are told in the past tense, then the narrator has hindsight and could theoretically be viewing the past through more recent events; looking with kindly eyes on someone who was previously mean but would subsequently improve. However in the present tense you cannot be given that kind of information; you can only know what the narrator knows at that point in time.
It needn't be jarring; as with any art the best way to receive from it is to just experience it. See this, perhaps, as a more cinematic experience than a past-tense novel would be (as discussed here by Mignon "Grammar Girl" Fogarty).
Let's compare a scene:
Misha sat down on the sofa and looked over at me. She smiled a small
smile, but I could read the pain in the redness of her eyes.
Misha sits down on the sofa and looks over at me. She smiles a small
smile, but her eyes are red, and I can read pain in them.
In the present tense we have to largely experience things in the order that the narrator does, and the thoughts in their order too. We are not treated to analysis or retrospect, we get a stream of events.
It is a device for the writer to convey immediacy, and perhaps to add an edge of being present in the moment, rather than of reflection, and can help the writer (and the reader) focus on the experiential aspect of a scene rather than the symbolism or the abstract. As with any technique, it can succeed or it can fail.
I look over at the tree I can see out of the window, over the rooftops. It is utterly still, until a breeze riffles some leaves, and a bird shoots up from within the tree. I feel trapped at my desk, in the intense corporate stillness; I want the freedom to ascend.
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