Service by John Tottenham. Semiotext(e), 328 pages. 2025.<\/p>\n
Back in 1997, I walked into my seventh-grade art class and found my teacher Ms. Philips in an anxious mood. Throughout the mid-nineties, her teenage sons\u2019 ska band The Gadjits had been gigging around Kansas City, Missouri, when they suddenly got signed to Rancid\u2019s label Hellcat. As class started, Ms. Philips popped in her son\u2019s new CD and passed around the case. Listening to their tracks, I was floored that anyone I knew could record an actual album. But my teacher wasn\u2019t a proud parent boasting about her kids\u2019 achievements, or even an impassioned arts educator imparting the priceless lesson that with resilience and grit, anyone, even absolute nobodies like us from the Midwest, could \u201cmake it.\u201d No. In fact, Ms. Philips played the album so we could help her understand her boys\u2019 incomprehensible decision: The Gap, according to Ms. Philips, had offered her sons $10,000 to star in a commercial, and they refused.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy sons said, \u2018We don\u2019t care how much money they pay us,\u2019\u201d Ms. Philips told us, shaken. \u201cThey keep saying, \u2018We won\u2019t sell out!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
These days it\u2019s difficult to imagine any artist, of any genre, coming to a similar decision as The Gadjits. In twenty-five years, \u201cselling out\u201d has gone from artistic taboo to artistic aspiration. And though I sometimes long for that punky spirit to reanimate our culture, it\u2019s no great mystery why it faded into oblivion: younger generations have inherited a far more predatory, stratified economic reality. If in the nineties we still enjoyed some Great Society crumbs, now we\u2019re cast into the attention economy, a Hobbesian jungle dominated by the whims of tech billionaires. In The Gadjits\u2019 more genteel era, when it was still possible, if not easy, to earn a living as an independent artist, fans fiercely drew lines around \u201cuncompromised\u201d art and rewarded\u2014or penalized\u2014artists for crossing them. Given that success today depends so heavily on proprietary platforms, on getting attention any way possible, the system of reward and punishment for those who do and do not sell out has all but vanished.<\/p>\n
This distant memory of The Gadjits, and the even more remote discourse around \u201cselling out,\u201d came back to me while reading John Tottenham\u2019s acerbic debut novel Service. Though focused on a different medium, milieu, and millennium, Service hums with a similar anti-sell out ethos, one that feels increasingly anachronistic in today\u2019s world. Now, cultural production demands artists transform themselves into consumable brands and pump out a miserable parade of content to please the algorithm. The price of an artistic career is nothing less than a dip into the murky social media swamp. This has resulted in a disturbing frictionlessness between art and \u201ccontent,\u201d and the endless reel of advertisements, thirst traps, food porn, and atrocities we spend entire days scrolling through.<\/p>\n
Service, however, with its caustic prose, aggrieved narrator, and profound revulsion at the slick dystopia so many of us find ourselves in, bristles with friction. This is, in part, why I liked the book so much. In a cultural moment that can feel like an interminable, nauseating night of the spins, Service is a sobering slap in the face. The novel reminds us that artistic integrity is not just a relic from a bygone era but a choice loaded with risk.<\/p>\n
From behind the register of an LA bookshop, Service\u2019s narrator Sean Hangland nurses an endless array of resentments. He\u2019s old, a bachelor, being hounded by creditors, and most embarrassing of all, never managed to publish a novel. Besides reading at home in his bathtub, one of Sean\u2019s few joys seems to be how rudely he can treat customers at the shop where he works, Mute Books (a stand-in for the legendary LA caf\u00e9-bookstore Stories). Service is peppered with vignettes of his truculent on-the-clock behavior:<\/p>\n
A mild-mannered young regular wandered in and stood in front of the counter, smiling, awaiting some sort of acknowledgement.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou look happy,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think I am,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, keep it to yourself. It might be contagious.\u201d<\/p>\n
He moved along to the coffee counter.<\/p>\n
\u201cHey.\u201d Another smiling customer stood there.<\/p>\n
\u201cYes.\u201d I stifled a snarl.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s this book about?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know, I haven\u2019t read it.\u201d Am I supposed to read every book in this store in order to save you the trouble? Why don\u2019t you open it yourself.<\/p>\n
Hangland\u2019s bitterness is rooted in deeper class resentments. Many of the \u201cbohemians\u201d who pop by gloat about mysteriously funded real estate purchases, blockbuster film deals, and younger, trust-funded girlfriends. He\u2019s broke and stuck in the decidedly dying industry of literature, while everyone else seems to be surging into the future.<\/p>\n
Tottenham, who has previously published four volumes of poetry, pays acute attention to language, giving Sean a Victorian-style vocabulary that highlights the narrator\u2019s alienation from his internet-drenched surroundings. While railing against kids overusing the word like, Sean throws around archaic terms such as scrofulous, scrivener, and masticate. Though the intentionally antiquated prose can be cumbersome, it amplifies Sean\u2019s disgust with reality, adding to the sense of friction I mentioned earlier.<\/p>\n
And yet it\u2019s difficult feeling too bad for Sean. By his own admission he\u2019s a pill popper and a boozer, a procrastinator, a mediocre employee, and in decades of writing hasn\u2019t bothered completing a manuscript. If The Gadjits from my youth embodied the anti-sell out attitude, then Sean revives an equally iconic archetype from that era: the slacker. \u201cI was disciplined enough to sit down to write on an almost daily basis but rarely disciplined enough to spend that time actually writing,\u201d he admits.<\/p>\n
Unlike his friends and rivals, no one offers Sean the opportunity to sell out, but that\u2019s not really the point, at least according to him. He believes he has something far more valuable than wealth: he has integrity, a quality which, along with his shaky work ethic, characterizes his struggle to complete his novel. Though he\u2019s friendly with established writers and artists, Sean\u2019s insecurities lead him to seek feedback instead from a young Mute Books coworker we only know as \u201cthe boy.\u201d At first, Sean\u2019s manuscript impresses the boy, giving Sean the courage to continue writing. Slowly, however, the boy\u2019s critiques sharpen, until they cut to the heart of Sean\u2019s creative conundrum, and draw blood:<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u201cYou have three or four characters that serve the same purpose. . . . They\u2019ve compromised themselves professionally or romantically or whatever; they\u2019ve cut deals, whereas you . . .\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe protagonist,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhatever,\u201d said the boy. \u201cHe has integrity . . . You\u2019re always measuring his failure and integrity against other people\u2019s success and supposed lack of integrity.\u201d<\/p>\n
In Service, failure metastasizes into a sort of spell, one that bewitches Sean into believing his lack of success is due to principles rather than torpor and poor discipline. In one of the many scenes at Mute Books, Sean lectures a customer about literature, declaring that \u201cif something\u2019s popular, it\u2019s usually crap.\u201d Criticizing art on the basis of its popularity is typical of anti-sell out and slacker discourse, but Tottenham is too crafty to typecast Sean as a flat, puritanical aesthete; instead, he creates a delicious tension between Sean\u2019s impulses\u2014his integrity and his indolence\u2014that lead him to write but also paralyze his creative potential. It\u2019s something of a catch-22: because Sean fears becoming yet another mediocre hack, he avoids finishing his book, but because he avoids finishing his book, he\u2019s yet another mediocre hack.<\/p>\n
Tottenham knows better than to romanticize artistic purity without revealing its consequences.<\/p>\n
Tottenham inflames Sean\u2019s neurosis through the question of labor. Money, specifically the lack of it, fuels Sean\u2019s creative anxieties. Unlike seemingly everyone else in LA\u2019s creative class, he must balance writing with paying work, and he spends much time reflecting on how anyone can be expected to create anything of value when so many precious hours are wasted at tedious day jobs. As Tottenham reminds us throughout Service, once upon a time, before LA\u2019s hyper-gentrification, life in sunny Southern California was easier. For years, Sean skated by as a freelance arts journalist and copyeditor. But with the rise of digital media, the writing racket collapsed, and Sean degraded himself by taking the gig at Mute Books, a job he expected to last a few months but which looks increasingly like a life sentence. The LA that could once support a generation of Seans on cheap rent and low-stakes side hustles, sadly, is gone. \u201cProspectors and profiteers\u201d destroyed the city, and even \u201cordinary pleasures and consolations that used to be taken for granted, like coffee and beer, were now fetishized.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not that Sean\u2019s an anti-gentrification activist or a dues-paying member of the tenant\u2019s union. He\u2019s far too misanthropic for anything so socially minded. Any interaction whatsoever with the \u201crelentless barrage of humanity\u201d at Mute Books drains him physically and spiritually, as if the sole duties of a bookseller were to listen to music and read for eight hours. In this way, Service seems in conversation with Gen X touchstones such as Richard Linklater\u2019s Slacker (1990), Kevin Smith\u2019s Clerks (1994) and Stephen Frears\u2019 High Fidelity (2000), stories where protagonists brimming with culture and intellect\u2014characters like Sean\u2014sputter under the weight of their own mediocrity. \u201cI had turned into one of those people I used to fear,\u201d confesses Sean. \u201cOne of those sour and angry old booksellers or record-store clerks who intimidated me as a youth.\u201d<\/p>\n
As Service progresses, Sean\u2019s attempt to write his book, despite his own deteriorating economic and emotional state, sparks a metafictional discourse about the writing of Service itself. Sean\u2019s novel begins sounding eerily similar to Service, which is littered with rich autobiographical clues that apply to its author, John Tottenham, who also occasionally works as an arts journalist and is a bookseller at Stories. One evening over drinks with a rival, Sean lets slip one of the few earnest remarks in Service\u2019s 328 pages:<\/p>\n
\u201cUnfortunately, I have to get it out of my system and actualize myself before I die,\u201d I said, the desired apathy having slipped away.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat do you mean by \u2018actualize myself\u2019?\u201d said Jackson, leerily.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou know, to externalize yourself, to bring forth what is within, to get it out of your system, and into other people\u2019s systems; to provoke, console, inspire, if it\u2019s within one\u2019s means. . . . Then, for some, I suppose, there are material rewards. I\u2019m not expecting that.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a novel full of acidic judgments and mounting disappointments, this moment stands out as one of great tenderness and vulnerability. Sean writes not for clout, money, or to flip his novel into an A24 film but because he feels a simple need to express himself, to move people, to, as cringe as it may sound, put artistic energy out into the universe and feel it flow back at him. Perhaps it\u2019s quaint, certainly it\u2019s na\u00efve, but in a world where \u201cselling out\u201d is so common that we no longer even recognize it as selling out, Sean\u2019s motivations, and his curmudgeonly outlook on life, feel urgent and all the more charming.<\/p>\n
Tottenham knows better than to romanticize artistic purity without revealing its consequences, however. In 2025, few writers\u2014or bands or artists\u2014can keep the lights on with their art. Now selling out has become a luxury, something only the wealthy can afford\u2014perhaps why it\u2019s fallen out of vogue as an insult. Most artists need a job (or two or three) to survive and must balance those demands with their creative practice\u2014a reality that drives Sean to the brink of madness.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This dichotomy comes into focus toward the end of Service, when Sean\u2019s creditors catch up to him and garnish his wages at Mute Books. While calculating how he\u2019ll work additional shifts with even less time for writing, yet another wave of customers crashes into the store, flooding him with requests. Like so much of Service, this scene pulls the reader in conflicting directions, one comedic and the other tragic. After being told off by Sean, a shocked customer finds the audacity to talk back:<\/p>\n
\u201cIs this like some sort of joke?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes, it\u2019s a massive joke. The world, life and everything. Try to remember that. It will help you enormously as you make your way through life. And can you stop saying \u2018like,\u2019 you\u2019re over the age of twelve.\u201d<\/p>\n
For a character so proud of his offline life, who believes it\u2019s yet another mark of his integrity, Sean ironically falls victim to one of the darker punishments of the chronically online: the meltdown video. \u201cA woman standing a few yards away, at a safe distance, was filming me on her cell phone. Why not go all the way? Fuck it. I ran across the room, grabbed the cell phone out of her hand and smashed it on the floor. It felt good.\u201d He snaps and, instead of shelving books, starts hurling them at customers. \u201cThere were books all over the floor\u2014Kant, Kierkegaard, Locke, Montaigne, Nietzsche\u2014the wisdom of the ages scattered in rage and sadness.\u201d Unsurprisingly, he\u2019s fired.<\/p>\n
Seemingly everyone in Service \u201cgrows up\u201d: the boy giving Sean feedback quits Mute Books to pursue music, Sean\u2019s boss makes a play at becoming a literary agent, his circle of life-long bohemians and bachelors sell out in exchange for families, stability and housing. In other words, they evolve, they change, they get with the times. And in his own way, so does Sean. While surviving on unemployment, he sheds his slackerdom and finishes his book. \u201cWas this piece of overwrought middle-aged juvenilia something I\u2019d want to read?\u201d Sean reflects of his own work. \u201cFrankly, no. It would probably annoy me.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some principles, it seems, are worth clinging to, not because they lead us to success but paradoxically because they don\u2019t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Service by John Tottenham. Semiotext(e), 328 pages. 2025. Back in 1997, I walked into my seventh-grade art class…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5290,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[153,155,154],"class_list":["post-5289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem-headlines","tag-bethlehem-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5289"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5289\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5290"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}