“I have decided to stop writing for a while,” began Sean’s novel, until a friend stole that line. Subsequently, John Tottenham’s prose debut Service – seemingly the finished manuscript of Sean’s fictional efforts – kicks off in a different fashion.
Like LA-based poet and artist Tottenham, ex-journalist Sean works in a bookstore following the collapse of print media. He documents his travails with faulty card machines, unporous clientele – “the humorlessness, the relentlessness f***ing humorlessness” – and vampiric regulars who satiate themselves on his social battery. Sean’s melodrama is often entertaining – for parsimony’s sake, he urges the reader to imagine “unfortunately” beginning every sentence – and even his genuine bitterness is softened by self-awareness.
“Shouldn’t art be the residue of life and not the main thing?” Closing in on 50, Sean’s writerly ambitions haven’t got him anywhere. The formulaic recovered addict memoir is off the cards – “[unfortunately] I had always been able to handle my drink and drugs” – and Sean’s ineptitude with fiction’s building blocks leaves him defeated.
Living – as opposed to consuming and attempting art – proves tricky when life is unsavoury; Sean’s Echo Park neighbourhood is being gentrified. “Ordinary pleasures ... like beer and coffee are fetishised” and big cities are sanitised to the point of interchangeability. “A flâneur in utopia with nowhere left to flan,” Sean is being priced out of a city he considers home, and hides out in the last dive bar standing.
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His first-hand accounts of gentrification are measured and effective, and his complaints about noise pollution timely. He bemoans the loss of payphones, which, before the “technology of self-absorption”, signified a shared, but now lost, respect for public spaces.
Turned off of living and provoked by irrational comparisons – “Robert Lowell died at the age of 60, Richard Hugo at the age of 59. That gave me 10 years” – Sean decides to pick up the pen again. “Procrastination,” after all, is “counterfeit immortality.”
While Sean just wants to complete something, Tottenham’s novel is surprisingly inventive. Sean discusses the manuscript itself, by means of apologetic footnotes, edits, and criticism. The result is a novel that reaches beyond itself, and while Tottenham’s awareness of his faults doesn’t excuse them, playful acknowledgment does capture the spirit of Service: “f*** it, I’m tired.”
