Service by John Tottenham review – comic confessions of a grumpy bookseller

“I had become a living cliche: the cantankerous bookseller,” the narrator declares a third of the way through John Tottenham’s debut novel. “No book or movie that included a scene set in a bookstore was complete without such a stock ‘character’.” That’s one way to pre-empt criticism, and Sean Hangland is just such a stock figure. Embittered, rude, apathetic, resentful of the success and happiness of others and intellectually snobbish, he’s a 48-year-old aspiring writer who makes ends meet, just about, working in an independent bookshop in a gentrifying part of LA. He worries about turning 50 having made nothing of his life. He notes, lugubriously, that he barely seems to get any writing done and that – having no gift for plot, characterisation or prose – the novel he claims to be trying to produce will be lousy anyway. He keeps bumping into old friends whose books are being published by hip independent presses or who have acquired nice girlfriends, or both. His teeth are in bad shape. He rails against the gentrification of the neighbourhood by large corporations and sheeplike hipsters. And he rages, above all, against the customers in the bookshop, who ask him stupid questions, buy copies of trendy books he considers bad, ask for directions to the toilets, insist on paying by credit card, block up the aisles talking noisily on their phones or, worse, attempt to engage him in friendly conversation. He is very rude to all of them, especially the ones with beards, and they complain about him on Yelp, and his boss in turn tells him off, which increases his bitterness. He keeps bumping into old friends whose books are being published or who have acquired nice girlfriends, or both That, for more than 300 pages, is about it. The book is a long, very repetitive monologue (we meet versions of the same riff on the annoyingness of addiction memoirs at least three times) which knowingly enacts the tedious stasis of which its narrator complains. It’s not without its moments. I liked, for instance, the sour footnote in which he says: “Rather than me wasting my time inserting the word ‘unfortunately’ into every statement, from now on the reader should just assume it is there.” (Shades of Martin Amis’s “Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I’m always smoking another cigarette.”) But it doesn’t have the wacky charm of Black Books or the volcanic wit of A Confederacy of Dunces, and I can’t help thinking that its contemporary digs – we meet Ben Lerner, Miranda July, Kim Gordon and Michelle Tea as “Len Berner”, “Samantha August”, “Gordon Kim” and “Michelle Coffee” – will date fast. Plus, that the annoying customers are effectively interchangeable – I lost count of how many asked the way to the loo – is baked into the text. Another footnote says: “I can’t spend hours coming up with a name for a character, especially one that isn’t going to appear again in this book. Bill will have to do.” Yet for all the show of insouciance, Tottenham’s prose is effortful. You get sentences such as: “Most of my contemporaries had moved on and were now established in their professional, creative and familial lives, whereas I had turned a corner and hit a wall, with the contrary values of youth hammered into place: a callow negativism matured to a dubious vintage, with a voluptuous bouquet of regret and a lingering aftertaste of self-disgust.” Parklife! The book that Sean is writing, incidentally, is the book that we are reading. A colleague who works in the coffee shop – called only “the Boy” – persuades our hero to show him the manuscript, and then slightly seems to regret it. I don’t know if Tottenham – an LA-dwelling Brit who has published poetry and exhibited as an artist – has worked in a bookshop, so can’t say if the reflexivity goes a layer deeper still. At one point, Sean discusses giving his narrator a name and says: “I was considering using Sean for his first name but a lot of people seem to dislike that name and it’s too phonetically close to my own name.” Sean may be “phonetically close” to John, but it’s phonetically identical to Sean, which is indeed what Sean is called in the book. This could be a postmodern masterstroke, or it could simply be another “can’t be bothered” shrug. Service has clearly tickled some distinguished funny-bones – Colm Tóibín (“a rare comic intensity”) and Rachel Kushner (“my favourite nihilistic romantic”) both gush from the cover – so your mileage may, as they say, vary. But this reader found it a bit of a slog. • Service by John Tottenham is published by Tuskar Rock (£14.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.