Service (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents)

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.

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). A unique purveyor of “magnanimous misanthropy” and “magical cynicism,” Tottenham has been described as “Los Angeles’s foremost poète maudit.” 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.