Service

John Tottenham writes with a rare comic intensity — Colm Tóibín

My favourite nihilistic romantic — Rachel Kushner

In his late forties, John, a failed journalist and failing novelist, finds himself working at a bookstore in a rapidly gentrifying Los Angeles neighbourhood, where he is thrown into the company of a younger generation with whom he has little in common.

Embittered by his lowly position at this late stage of what had once been a promising career, he collapses his ambition of writing a novel into a hilariously cathartic litany of contempt for his present circumstances.

In between chasing noisy cell-phone users around the shop and wrapping books he hates for wealthy mums he hates even more, John reflects on his fraught relationship with service as an unrepentant outsider in an age of conformity.

With dry wit, John Tottenham's debut novel, Service, reflects on a farrago of contemporary afflictions: gentrification, debt, self-medication, male vanity, professional jealousy, the perils of political correctness, and the role of literature in the digital era.