Service by John Tottenham

Service by John Tottenham

A darkly comic novel set on the lower slopes of the Los Angeles literary world.

I stepped out to behold a crimson-streaked sky that would soon be adorning ten thousand Instagram posts, and walked down the sleepy residential streets, suffused with a soft and forgiving evening light, to the main drag. It felt like the end here, both sanctuary and termination: a soft place of harsh realities where a sun that once meant something barely brushed against the world. The perfect spring evening was blighted only by the citizenry.

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.

Tottenham, John: - John Tottenham is a British-born writer & artist living in Los Angeles. After graduating from London's worst art school in the mid-'80s, Tottenham moved to the US, where he has resided ever since, mostly toiling upon the lower slopes of journalism. After many years of resistance, he finally sold out to the lucrative, fast-paced world of poetry. He is the author of The Inertia Variations - an epic poetic cycle on the subjects of work avoidance, failure, & indolence. The work was hailed as a terrific collection in the Guardian, quiescent genius by Mojo Magazine, and comedy gold by 3: AM.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781635902495
ISBN 10	1635902495
Title	Service
Author	John Tottenham
Series	Semiotext Native Agents Ser
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Semiotext (E)
Year published	2025-05-06
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.