John Tottenham: Service

A journalist in his late forties—having lost his job as a consequence of the death of print media—finds himself working at a bookstore in a rapidly gentrifying Los Angeles neighborhood, where he is thrown into the company of a younger generation with whom he has little in common. Embittered by his lowly position at this late stage of what had once been a promising career, he collapses his longtime ambition of writing a novel into a hilariously cathartic litany of contempt for his present circumstances.

Service examines the plight of the unrepentant artistic outsider in an unforgiving day and age. It alternates between passages that painstakingly describe the protagonist’s fraught attempts to write his novel and such scenes of service work as wrapping children’s books for Silver Lake moms and being “pilloried by dunces” on Yelp. As his writing process stalls in a “stale ceremony” of indolence and self-doubt, these unfamiliar humiliations become a toxic wellspring for his irascible observations.

With his notoriously dry wit, John Tottenham’s debut novel reflects on a farrago of contemporary afflictions: gentrification, debt, friendship, aging gracelessly, self-medication, male vanity, professional jealousy, the perils of political correctness, and the role of literature in the digital era. Eventually, after endlessly agonizing about matters of form and style, he finds that despite himself he has actually written a book.