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.
A work of autofiction, one that disparages the genre while indulging in its most egocentric tendencies ad nauseam. It is hilarious, depressing, tedious, refreshingly mean-spirited and often brilliant ... Tottenham cuts the figure of an erudite and rakish stand-up comic, wielding his expansive vocabulary as much to goad as to gloat ... A strong entry in the canon of antisocial fiction, Service is also a sincere meditation on the self-destructive urge behind the act of writing.
The reader sympathizes with the loser ... The scenes of interactions at the store are jarring and occasionally agonizing, even if terribly funny in Tottenham’s sardonic voice ... The book captures the reality of life as a committed writer ... It demonstrates the crushing nature of having a day job ... I couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride, of hope, of affection for the cantankerous bookseller at having completed and published a work of substance, which we know now, if we didn’t before, is no small feat.
Taut, hilarious ... As raw as it is comic. This pair of terms, raw and comic, captures the mood of Service, a very funny book about the very unfunny situation called class society ... ottenham both refuses to romanticize the condition of being down and out and finds in it something much more admirable than the jaunty pretensions of LA’s grifters, hacks, and social climbers.
