Service

(Paperback, Main)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

'John Tottenham writes with a rare comic intensity' Colm Tibn'My favourite nihilistic romantic' Rachel KushnerIn his late forties, John, a failed journalist and failing novelist, finds himself working at a bookstore in a rapidly gentrifying Los Angeles neighbourhood, 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 ambition of writing a novel into a hilariously cathartic litany of contempt for his present circumstances. In between chasing noisy cell-phone users around the shop and wrapping books he hates for wealthy mums he hates even more, John reflects on his fraught relationship with service as an unrepentant outsider in an age of conformity. With dry wit, John Tottenham's debut novel reflects on a farrago of contemporary afflictions: gentrification, debt, self-medication, male vanity, professional jealousy, the perils of political correctness, and the role of literature in the digital era.

Reviews

So heartfelt that we find ourselves howling with laughter because, despite his best efforts, John Tottenham writes with a rare comic intensity and re-creates himself in the guise of an unforgettable character in fiction -- Colm Tibn
The weariest bohemian, with a Keatsian death-drive he somehow keeps outliving, John Tottenham is my favourite nihilistic romantic -- Rachel Kushner, Booker-shortlisted author of Creation Lake
Hilarious, refreshingly mean-spirited and often brilliant * Washington Post *

Author Bio

John Tottenham is the author of four volumes of poetry: The Inertia Variations (2004 & 2010), Antiepithalamia & Other Poems of Regret and Resentment (2012), The Hate Poems (2018), and Fresh Failure (2023). His long-standing column in Artillery is widely read, and his paintings and drawings have been exhibited in solo shows at galleries in Los Angeles and New York. Service is his first novel.