John Tottenham’s first novel is narrated by Sean, a lonely middle-aged independent bookseller in Los Angeles. The job was meant to be a stopgap after the art magazine he wrote for went bust, but five years have passed, and he’s still there.
Better-connected acquaintances toast book deals while his own long-stewed first novel goes nowhere. Debt collection agencies are on his tail, his addiction to painkillers is spiralling out of control and he no longer recognises his own neighbourhood: the scuzzy bar doling out $5 shot-and-a-beer specials now trades in “$15 cocktails poured by a mixologist with a waxed moustache”.
At first, Service engages the reader as a winningly grumpy workplace comedy, satirising the daily indignities and inanities of life in retail. “That would be amazing,” says one customer, accepting the routine offer of a bag; we can hear Sean grinding his teeth at the hyperbole without Tottenham needing to write a word. (Customers who smugly refuse a bag irritate him even more.)
He spends most of his day confirming that, yes, the shop has a toilet and, yes, there is a bin. He calculates that card transactions consume an hour and a half of his time every week, which makes “nine full workdays a year spent processing and handling these items of mercantile filth”. As his tirades grow increasingly vehement, we start to realise that we’re witnessing a breakdown, not entirely played for laughs – which isn’t to say we don’t keep finding it funny. Mostly, that’s an effect of the pleasure we take in Sean’s overwhelming sense of spite, but Tottenham’s cute metafictional devices also do plenty to keep us amused. After two blank pages indicate a section break, Sean bemoans his inability “to create the impression of time passing”.
Vexed by customers who don’t care about books, he’s even more wound up by customers who do
The first time he uses the word “unfortunately”, a footnote says he won’t in future be “wasting my time inserting the word ... into every statement, from now on just assume it is there”. In-jokey references abound to American literary figures, the names mischievously changed: my favourite was “Gruel Mucus” for Greil Marcus.
While there’s a love interest of sorts – a regular browser making eyes across the counter – their eventual coupling is almost confrontationally unsentimental; the same goes for a rare bit of backstory involving a breakup after Sean was caught cheating with a woman half his age.
The narrator’s messiest affair is with literature itself. Vexed by customers who don’t care about books, he’s even more wound up by customers who do: they care in the wrong way.
A hit Brazilian novella is “another case of bad writers for bad readers, and vice versa”; another buzzy title is one of the few books Sean enjoys selling, because he likes watching customers choose it after reading the racy opening, unaware that “following this paean to the pleasures of rough sex, it descended into a tiring tangle of identity politics and gender issues in the form of autofiction”.
Tickled by literary fads, Service nonetheless manages to hit the zeitgeist. As a portrait of gentrification, it overlaps with Vincenzo Latronico’s novel Perfection, only told from the point of view of the done-to, not the doers; and as a discomfiting farce of male midlife desire, it might pass for an awkward cousin to Miranda July’s All Fours.
If the story was set now, those are the books Sean would be selling; instead, its mid-to-late-2010s timeline means he is asked repeatedly for Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick and Jarett Kobek’s I Hate the Internet. “I loathed them,” says Sean, not that he’s read them – it’s just that he has sold too many copies of their books.
That’s another in-joke: Service shares its US publisher, Semiotext(e), with Kraus and Kobeck (their editor is the partner of Colm Tóibín, who is behind the imprint publishing it in the UK). No small part of the joy of this cleverly crotchety comedy lies in the reader imagining that, in a tarted-up dive bar somewhere in LA, there’s a debt-ridden bookseller with a stalled manuscript, grousing over an overpriced cocktail about how this John Tottenham character has all the luck.
Service by John Tottenham is published by Tuskar Rock (£14.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £13.49. Delivery charges may apply
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Portrait by Robert Ascroft