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.
For fans of the classic television sitcom Black Books (2000-04) – in which, Tottenham-aged readers will recall, Dylan Moran plays the cynical, perpetually grumpy and sarcastic bookseller Bernard Black with absolutely world-class charm – Service will come as welcome news. There are many shades of Black here, along with E. M. Cioran and a hint of Nick Hornby. Let’s be honest, Tottenham’s highly accomplished shtick – that people are awful, life’s a bitch and writing’s a pain – is always going to find a warm and receptive audience ... The satire is broad, the targets are familiar and the nods and winks are all deeply satisfying ... Once the snark and sneer wear thin, which they do, the novel becomes rather more complex, with Tottenham mercilessly interrogating the myth of the solitary writer ... The insights into the pathetic horrors and delights of writing are spot-on ... Some readers will perhaps despair of all this self-indulgence. For what it’s worth, I marked up almost every page for the zingers, the takedowns and the memorable sad man lit bantz.
