Review of John Tottenham Service – Comedic Confessions of an Angry Bookseller | imaginary

“I “It’s become a living cliche: the evil bookseller,” the narrator declares a third of the way through John Tottenham’s first novel. “No book or movie that included a scene in a bookstore would be complete without such a stock ‘character’.” This is one way to pre-empt criticism, and Sean Hangeland is just an ordinary character. Bitter, rude, apathetic, resentful of others’ success and happiness and intellectually arrogant, a 48-year-old aspiring writer who makes ends meet is about to take a job at an independent bookstore in an upscale part of Los Angeles.

He is worried about turning 50 after having done nothing in his life. He points out, pathetically, that he barely gets any writing done, and that the novel he claims he’s trying to produce will be poor anyway—for lack of talent for plot, characterization, or prose. He keeps running into old friends whose books are published by independent presses or who have acquired lovely girlfriends, or both. His teeth are in bad condition.

He opposes the gentrification of the neighborhood by big business and hipsters. He is angry, above all, against the customers in the bookstore, who ask him stupid questions, buy copies of trendy books he considers bad, ask directions to the restrooms, insist on paying by credit card, block the aisles and talk loudly on their phones, or worse, try 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 reprimands him, further embittering him.

This, for over 300 pages, is about it. The book is a long, overly repetitive monologue (we meet versions of the same riff on the nuisance of addiction memoirs at least three times) that deliberately embodies the tedious stasis of which the narrator complains. It’s not without its moments. I liked, for example, the biting footnote in which he says: “Instead of wasting my time inserting the word ‘unfortunately’ into every statement, the reader must henceforth assume it is there.” (Shades of Martin Amis’s line “Unless I specifically tell you otherwise, I’m always smoking another cigarette”).

But it doesn’t have the quirky charm of Black Books or the volcanic intelligence of A Confederacy of Dunces, and I can’t help but think that its contemporary digs — we meet Ben Lerner, Miranda July, Kim Gordon, and Michelle Tee as Lynne Burner, Samantha August, Gordon Kim, and Michelle Coffey — would soon be over. In addition, the possibility of effectively exchanging annoying customers – I lost count of the number of people who asked the way to the bathroom – is built into the text. Another footnote reads: “I can’t spend hours looking up a name for a character, especially one who won’t appear again in this book. Bill will have to do that.”

Yet, for all Spurs’s nonchalance, his prose is labored. You get sentences like: “Most of my contemporaries have moved on and are now well-established in their professional, creative and family lives, while I have turned a corner and hit a wall, with the opposite values ​​of youth fixed in their place: mature, questionable passivity, with a lustful bouquet of remorse and a residual taste of self-loathing.” Barcliffe!

The book Sean writes, by the way, is the book we’re reading. A colleague who works at the café – called just “The Boy” – convinces our hero to show him the manuscript, and then seems to regret it a little. I don’t know if Tottenham—a Briton based in Los Angeles, who has published poetry and exhibited as an artist—has ever worked in a bookstore, so I can’t say whether the reflexivity goes to a deeper level.

At one point, Sean discusses giving the narrator a name and says, “I was thinking of using Sean as his first name but a lot of people seem to hate that name and it’s phonetically very close to mine.” Sean may be “phonetically close” to John, but he is phonetically identical to Sean, and is actually what Sean is called in the book. This could be a postmodern jab, or it could be just another “can’t be bothered” shrug.

Clearly, the service has tickled some distinctly funny personalities — Colm Tóibin (“a rare comedic intensity”) and Rachel Kushner (“my favorite nihilistic romantic”) gush from the cover — so your mileage may vary, they say. But this reader found it a bit daunting.