REVIEW: John Tottenham’s Service
Jarett Kobek on John Tottenham’s SERVICE, out now from Semiotext(e), "a book about what it’s like when it all turns out bad."
Some writers are cursed with micro-fame. Back in distant years, one could walk through the streets of San Francisco with the late, lamented Kevin Killian and not go a block without encountering an admirer. But five miles east of Alameda County?
One spoke his name and drew no recognition.
John Tottenham is another such figure. For nearly two decades, this British exile has reigned as the poète roi of Los Angeles’s Echo Park and its surrounding environs. The status comes with its own complications. Make the mistake of meeting the man in a neighborhood bar and one shall suffer his admirers. A legion of creepy beglittered women and pork-pied beardos who believe in guitars.
Despite four volumes of published poetry, Tottenham’s renown rests not so much on his written words but in-person recitations of his work. He is one of the world’s most gifted readers, endowed with the capacity to transform the literary event, that most poisonous of cultural happenings, into a compelling experience.
Los Angeles doesn’t read but loves a performer. The city gags for a hit of old-world sophistication. Tottenham offers the perfect package for a metropolis that puts the noveau in riche. He is its dealer.
While one assumes that Tottenham must cultivate his status, the man himself could not be more at odds with the crass materiality of Los Angeles. Yes, he can hold forth on Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4 and other fetish objects of the culturatura, but he’s the only person in Echo Park who would rather spend the evening with George Gissing or Ivy Compton-Burnett. He is the last erudite in a locale where most residents worry that erudition is a communicable disease.
Now comes his debut novel Service, just published by Semiotext(e). It’s one of those texts that insists on being viewed through the prism of its author’s life. The book offers the story of a middle-aged man named Sean who works in an Echo Park bookstore and struggles to write a novel. Tottenham works at Stories on Sunset Boulevard. He is a middle-aged man who wrote a novel about a middle-aged man who works in a bookstore.
These days, works that borrow details from their authors’ lives labor beneath the shadow of autofiction. As with most taxonomical classifications devised by intolerable bores, autofiction is an empty word that separates the social classes. The practice that it purports to encompass– sorry, old assholes telling tall tales about their imagined exploits– has occurred for as long as there has been language. It’s the domain of drunkards and braggarts. But the clever people need something that separates us from them. When self-aggrandizing bullshit explodes on the Lex Fridman podcast, it’s the sure sign of a society in decline. When an instructor of post-grad Creative Writing serves up the same meal, it’s a sub-genre.
Despite a faint resemblance to autofiction, Service works in the opposite direction. The novel isn’t a tall tale that enriches the meagre details of its author’s life. It’s a reduction of vast and remarkable material into squalor. Sean is, like, a fucking loser, okay? Tottenham is a beloved success. He is famous in a city obsessed with fame. The difference between writer and protagonist could not be more stark.
Consider too the relationship between Sean’s novel and Tottenham’s published book. The simplest and most obvious leap: Service is Sean’s novel. Yet the text provides no evidence for this conclusion. In fact, it offers the contrary. Characters who’ve read Sean’s manuscript discuss scenes that never appear in the novel. Beyond these scant dialogues, there is no proof that Sean has written anything.
The easy interpretations fall apart. Service as an autofictive work. Or: Service as a comment on capitalism and the attendant humiliations of a post-industrial nation’s conversion to the service economy. The latter presumption is a bit more accurate than autofiction. Other than a few rogue sentences that end on a preposition, Tottenham is an extraordinarily fine writer. He is blessed with a gift for observation that emerges in scenes of noxious bookstore customers.
These scenes play as comedy. Service is no more a well-rounded critique of labor practices than it is autofiction. The book dwells in a realm that is more profound and terrible.
For decades, California told the world a lie. It went something like this: the state’s clever people knew better. They had it all figured out. There were new names and new words and new types of people. And the all pervading sense that if you weren’t doing it like them, then, honey, you weren’t doing it at all.
This oppression epicentered in the Golden State, but the ideologies weren’t trapped between its borders. Other regions had their own clever people. They weren’t from California but wished that they were. The ones who thought they were doing something, whose politics and art mattered, and whose efforts would last forever and lead to a better tomorrow. America’s coffee shops resounded with the sounds of their adenoidal jeers.
Service contains endless digression into the lives of Sean’s friends. These are people from the so-called creative classes. The clever ones. Relics of the old world.1 The recording artist who has become a shitty celebrity. The aspiring screenwriter who shacks up with an even shittier celebrity. The folks who pretended to be Marxist-Leninists while acquiring property and now sell homes to New York expatriates. Sean himself is a Gen-X journalist, one of those saddos who believed that they’d drift into their dotage whilst churning out reviews of Sonic Youth. (“...anthems with guitar noise and beautiful riffs doled out in equal measure...”)
In the most politically neutral way, the Presidential election of 5 November 2024 confirmed a suspicion that’s lurked since the pandemic. We live in new world. The previous incarnation is a desiccated corpse on the side of the road. Piece-by-piece, the wind blows away its husk. Humpty Dumpty will not be put together again. And, anyway, that yolk went rotten.
Most people from the other side, denizens from the dead old world, still hope that their aesthetics and beliefs and politics will save them. But the aesthetics were so weak that they failed to survive ten years of Tumblr. Everything remixed, screencapped, used up, burned out. Nothing can hold back the future. It turns out that the California people did not know better. They knew nothing. Reality is not a mirror that reflects the vanity of the useless. The clever people’s fantasies are nothing but autofiction.
Service is a book about what it’s like when it all turns out bad. When your cherished beliefs are revealed as fables told by rich kids and dope fiends. And what it feels like to be replaced and suffer the realization that everything you treasured, and thought permanent, was as erasable as marker on a white board. It’s about what happens when you keep doing the same thing long after that thing has stopped working. Nothing could be more of our present.
The capsule summary couldn’t sound worse. A novel about a middle-aged guy trying to write a novel. Push past the distillation and one discovers that Tottenmham’s novel is the book of the moment.
Very highly recommended.
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Jarett Kobek is a writer living in California. He is the author of several books including Invocation of My Demon Brother, Do Every Thing Wrong: XXXTentacion Against the World, and Motor Spirit.
I’m forced to note that the perhaps most prominent of these characters is based on myself. It starts as a fairly accurate portrayal that veers into pure fiction. Say this for Tottenham: my analog sounds like a brat. This, at least, is true to life.
Great review.