Sean is a 48 year old LA bookseller and frustrated writer. When he’s not loathing customers and dodging debt, he is often staring at a blank screen while zonked out on pills, urging himself to finally finish writing a book. Sean is also John Tottenham. And he did it with Service - bravo!
I really liked Service, John Tottenham’s debut (maybe only?) novel. It was unabashedly vitriolic, both against others and himself, in an articulate and entertaining fashion; it dealt with the day-to-day reality of actually producing art that you almost never see portrayed in fiction; and it was stylistically very playful throughout, slipping in and out of being meta, so that you never knew exactly what’s real and what isn’t. Mainly though, it’s well-written and enjoyable with a surprisingly likeable and relatable protagonist who I did want to see finally complete a novel.
It’s not a good idea to start interpreting details in a fictional story as fact but I feel that it’s safe to do so with certain parts of Service because I believe his protagonist Sean when he writes “I have no grasp of plot, character or dialogue and my imagination dried up years ago, so I’m obliged to rely on personal experience rather more than I would prefer or approve of.” (p.133) and “To write in a thinly disguised autobiographical manner and document the life of a middle-aged bookseller with frustrated artistic aspirations? No, I could never stoop that low.” (p.98).
And this is the most striking aspect of the novel, for me. I’ve also tried writing fiction and I saw the same thought patterns and behaviours mirrored in this book, and I’ve even thought to myself whether it was worth documenting this and forming it into a meta-textual novel, but didn’t know how or whether it was a good idea or to continue with it. Constantly comparing yourself to others’ ages, even a scene where Sean is looking up the sad life of Jackson C. Frank, are all things I’ve done - which makes me think a lot of people have done this too and this will be relatable to a quiet majority of readers (except for “self-actualizing” - no idea what that is). The best writing advice this novel of oft-neurotic prose offers to wannabe writers is persistence uber alles - completing the work is all that matters. The rest is for the birds. (And Blues Run the Game is a beautiful song).
The meta aspect - referencing writing the book as he’s writing it - gives the book a sense of urgency to it, in lieu of a driving plot, and makes the reading experience that much more engaging. Using substances to help write (or put you in an altered state of mind while you sit in front of a blank screen for hours) is a bit of a cliche, but I think the phrase he coins about this kind of novel - “pose friction” (p.252) is an inspired one.
Tottenham balances the wonderfully painful writing passages with scenes in the bookshop where Sean earns his meagre living. Think Rob Gordon in High Fidelity but even more grumpy, minus the love interests and charm and with more focus on despising the shop’s customers. The bookshop is called Mute, which is ironically always loud, filled with braying visitors whose main question isn’t book-related advice but about where the toilet is.
Rather than selling thought-provoking literature to inquiring minds, Sean tends to sell the same couple of popular books - Chris Kraus’ I Love Dick and Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey - to a stream of faceless mass, to the point where the titles blur together in an ongoing joke: “I Love Honey, Milk and Dick” (p.102), “I Love Hate, Just Milk and Dick and Honey” (p.109), “I Hate Honey, Just Dick and Milk and Kids” (p.191), “I Hate Milk” (p.231), “I Hate Dick and Milk the Internet” (p.288).
There’s also a passage mocking a wealthy actor called Jimmy Dripp who publishes crap autobiographical books about rock music and drugs by crap artists, which is a thinly-veiled razz at Johnny Depp, and another continuing joke throughout which is the perennially bad Yelp reviews about Sean’s bad attitude towards the customers. The jokes are mildly amusing rather than laugh out loud but gives the book some much-needed lightness as a counter to the keen hate.
These scenes also allow Sean to talk about writers and books (music sometimes too) which provides some fun factoids. Like how Bukowski wasn’t as poor as he made out to be in his books (he had a nest egg from the sale of family property to fall back on should he have needed to) as did other famous writers - William S. Burroughs, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, Sam Beckett, et al. who all had secret funds to allow them the freedom to write without requiring a job. I also got an interesting rec out of this too - Robert Walser, a Swiss writer who seems to have led an intriguing life in addition to writing, I hope, good books. I don’t think I’ve read a Swiss author before either.
Which is to say that Tottenham isn’t just doing thinly-veiled autofiction - he can write “regular” fiction, that is, like a real novel - even tossing in a belated subplot about debt collectors halfway through to add some more tension to Sean’s existence. He also keeps the metafictional parts engaging by utilising different methods as he’s discussing them with a character at the store who’s only described as “the boy” - like writing in media res, or complaining about monologues before embarking on one, talking about throwing in a sex scene at some point and then doing so.
He also includes some very obscure vocabulary seemingly for the heck of it (and why not?): “intempestive absquatulations” (p.78) which is an untimely fleeing; “sialoquence” (p.89) - spitting from the mouth while talking; “balneation” (p.172) - the act of bathing; “enturbulating mass” (p.289) - a chaotic mass, coined by sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard. These choices added to the narrative texture and enlivened the sentence making the reading experience more engaging.
Another reason I believe Sean is basically Tottenham when he says “I have no grasp of character” is because the characters are the weakest part of Service. They’re basically just names and I often had trouble remembering who Bob McGilt or Jackson Valvitcore were - one is a musician, one is an author, I think - and, despite figuring regularly, it takes a moment to remember who Gilbert (Sean’s boss) and Mitchell (his dealer) were because they’re not written especially memorably.
Sean’s habit of indulging in nihilism frequently also comes off as wearisome after a spell. Lines like “You don’t need to have a death wish to live in Los Angeles, but it helps” (p.37) and “A flaneur in autopia, with nowhere left to flan.” (p.56) come off as trying too hard to seem cool and/or aloof, rather than actually coming close to accomplishing either. And the gripes about procrastination and self-doubts, etc. do feel grindingly repetitious too, though I feel that this is also crucial to putting across how tiring actual creation can be to the creator.
And as downbeat a view as Sean has of actually great literature without dick or honey in the title - he notes that the dollar cart is stuffed with 19th century giants like Dickens and Thackeray - that shouldn’t be the only view of these books. Sure, classics can appear on dollar carts - they can also appear in fancy editions, well-kept on clean shelves in nice houses, because they are truly loved by their owners; a fate I hope is also destined for Service, because it’s a genuine work of art.
As tortuous as I believe writing Service was for John Tottenham, it was far from a wasted effort - this is a fantastic and unique novel about writing, about books, and about the artistic process, that’s also great fun to read and full of genuine feeling. Writers of all stripes will get the most out of this for sure. And I hope John Tottenham puts himself through the wringer once more so that we get another good book (maybe more…?) from him again. His world-weary, authentic and striking voice needs to be out there as a counterweight to the overabundance of dick and honey books on the shelves!
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