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.
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.
Acerbic ... Bristles with friction. This is, in part, why I liked the book so much. In a cultural moment that can feel like an interminable, nauseating night of the spins, Service is a sobering slap in the face ... Tottenham...pays acute attention to language, giving Sean a Victorian-style vocabulary that highlights the narrator’s alienation from his internet-drenched surroundings. … Though the intentionally antiquated prose can be cumbersome, it amplifies Sean’s disgust with reality, adding to the sense of friction ... Delicious tension.
