The following is from John Tottenham’s debut novel, Service. Tottenham’s novel reflects on a farrago of contemporary afflictions: gentrification, debt, friendship, aging gracelessly, self-medication, male vanity, professional jealousy, the perils of political correctness, and the role of literature in the digital era. Eventually, after endlessly agonizing about matters of form and style, he finds that despite himself he has actually written a book.
How the fuck did it come to this?
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A modest career on the lower slopes and outer fringes of journalism dried up when the frontiers of the internet opened up to people who were prepared, free of charge, to perform the services that writers had formerly been paid for.
Slopes: they were more like ditches, which I never tried hard enough to dig myself out of, having mostly slept in them, and fringes frayed to the point of ragged nonexistence.
A freelance writer and copyeditor, I edited an art magazine that folded amid the death of paper journalism (online revenue not being enough to sustain it). I also wrote a column for the same magazine that addressed various art-world idiocies and other vital issues of the day, which gained an enthusiastic local readership. However, after the magazine went under I made no attempt to place my monthly musings elsewhere, and found I didn’t have much to say anymore—it wasn’t always as easy as it might seem to find new things to complain about with conviction.
I continued to work as a freelancer until there was no longer enough freelance work to go around and hustling for work itself became too much work.
This unsteady means of self-employment was supposed to keep me going until the time inevitably rolled around when I could live in style on the returns from my own literary exertions, which I was toiling away at but never getting very far with. I was disciplined enough to sit down to write on an almost daily basis but rarely disciplined enough to spend that time actually writing. I never finished anything and seldom showed what I did to anybody.
For all but the most talented, driven and shameless hacks it was a parlous time to be plying the scrivener’s trade. The small income derived from freelance duties was augmented by the accumulation of substantial credit card debt that I defaulted on when I could no longer make the required minimum monthly payments. I was forced to let go of all my cards at once—they were all maxed out in any case, and I had drawn cash advances on as many of them as possible.
Bereft of credit and no longer able to scrape by as a freelance journalist or copyeditor, some form of gainful employment became an urgent necessity—that dreaded thing I had somehow succeeded in avoiding for so long: a steady job.
Fortuitously enough, around this time a friend was in the process of opening a bookstore/café. Although I had never worked in a bookstore before, or in any line of retail work, and despite being temperamentally unsuited for such employment, she hired me out of sympathy, and I brought my friend Gilbert—thirty-four years of age and a recovering alcoholic—on board.
In those purer days there wasn’t a café on every street corner and not every single business had been transmogrified into a pallid, youth-accessible version of its former self. There was no bookstore in the neighborhood at the time and it seemed like a good time to open one, with an adjoining café. Somebody had the bright idea of naming the place Mute Books.
At first, the selection of both new and secondhand books was embarrassing in its lack of quality and variety, but it improved greatly due to Gilbert’s tireless work, into which he poured the full force of his addictive personality.
Now that it had become a respectable store—not exactly a powerhouse of idealistic utilitarianism but a far cry from its charmingly shabby origins—it served more as a neighborhood hangout and tourist attraction, as has every exploitable space in the heart of what was named, in a major weekly periodical, “the second hippest neighborhood in the country.” Not too many bibliophiles cross the threshold of this establishment. Mostly it attracts the sort of people who wouldn’t usually enter a bookstore: gawkers, pleasure-seekers, and fun-loving family groups who descend upon it en masse, especially on weekends, with most people walking straight through, chatting loudly on cell phones as they do so (we get it: you’re “on the go”), to the café at the other end of the store.
In my midforties, with the résumé of a much-younger man, I reentered the workforce as a bookstore employee.
It’s an honorable profession, of course, being a middle-aged middleman in the service of education and enlightenment—deepening, broadening, comforting and corrupting people’s minds with potentially dangerous wisdom—and it requires a certain amount of knowledge, but it’s not the kind of knowledge that translates into money.
I signed on for a couple of shifts a week, expecting the position to last no longer than six months. Five years later, I’m still there.
*
Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, decade after decade, consumed by this precious illusion of service to the pen: priceless time that might somehow have been used to benefit others, to benefit myself, from which I might even have derived pleasure.
Yet nothing definite emerged from it, only a copious and chaotic abundance of glorified note making.
There was no glory in it. And what have I received in return for this self-serving—if that—satisfaction of having attempted to actualize myself? Poverty and solitude have been the chief rewards.
And what, actually, was I attempting to actualize? Did I have anything to say that was worth saying at all, that hadn’t been said better before, that might have justified such a substantial investment of time and energy: this unflagging commitment to a lost cause, as if it were a sacred act and not a sickness born of vanity?
What would happen if I didn’t do it? Nothing. Nobody would notice. It wouldn’t make any difference to anybody.
And I would be greatly relieved by the removal of this most unnecessary burden.
*
And I ask again: How the fuck did it come to this?
The plan—such as it was, such as it wasn’t—was to live as fully as possible until I turned thirty; my twenties were to be reserved exclusively for adventure and experimentation. Then, having accumulated a sufficiently rich treasury of knowledge and experience, to embark upon a lifelong stretch of literary immersion.
To some extent I succeeded in this, but having fallen into the practice of just living, I found it a hard habit to break, to the extent that by the time I turned forty I still hadn’t done anything—to speak of, so to speak—with my life; and entering my midforties, emerging from the fog of youth into the relative clarity of middle age, I found myself in much the same position I’d been in fifteen years earlier, with only an abundance of worthless repetition to my credit.
Throughout those two decades, however, I couldn’t entirely resist what I thought of as my calling: I made myself write but I never finished anything, other than remunerative work. I had it in me, that which had to come out, but out of contrariness, self-spite and furtive optimism, I stifled it. I was never sufficiently invested in myself, from a practical standpoint, to make the necessary provisions. I figured that when the time came there would still be enough time—as if the future would stretch out indefinitely in order to accommodate my creative inhibitions.
One might or might not be forgiven for optimistically assuming that time stands still when one isn’t doing anything; but although it seems to, it doesn’t.
Throughout those lost years what, if anything, did I produce? Notes, only notes, dusty piles of notes, palimpsests in progress, discarded drafts, abundant abandoned works: a lengthy treatise on prewar country blues lyrics, accompanied by hundreds of couplets that were noted down as I listened to them and which were subsequently classified and considered in an essay that ran twenty thousand words before I gave up on it, having tasted the bitter pangs of rejection from several agents. At least two years went into that—not long compared to some other projects (four years were once spent on a twenty-thousand-word novella that I didn’t even attempt to get published). Then there was the aborted fifty-thousand-word novel concerning the misadventures of a young man staying at an old-time residential hotel in a small Texas town, and a discontinued novel of comparable length about an aging hack attempting to write a novel: not the most original idea but I had hoped to bring something new to the exhausted enterprise.
Why, in the name of Mercy, did I embrace, albeit half-heartedly, this literary racket? And why did I wait until now, until it was so late in the day, so late in the lifetime, to do the right thing and stop writing? It really had been a lifetime in the service of literature: if I wasn’t writing, I was reading, and these days, selling books, which sadly seemed to be the most useful of these activities.
Life was supposed to be composed of many chapters, and I had been writing, reading, rewriting and rereading the same one for years on end, until all the life had been written out of it. Repetition and incompletion were the two staples of my life in art.
As if anybody would be foolish enough to expect to be rewarded for a dedication to literature in this day and age. And yet, some people were …
“So many had sacrificed themselves for art without even their names surviving. On the other hand, what mattered most was that all who had given themselves to their work had their real reward in having actualized themselves.”
It was easy enough for John Berryman to say that, considering the security of his place in the pantheon. To put it another way: so many had focused so much time and energy into producing work for which the world had no use, and all they got out of it was frustration and bitterness.
Could there really be any satisfaction in having actualized oneself if nobody else benefited from or even noticed one’s actualization?
Based upon my personal observations, I would have to answer emphatically in the negative.
And now I had a new dilemma facing me: what to do with my time now that I had stopped attempting to write.
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This excerpt appears in John Tottenham’s Service, which will be published by Semiotext(e) on May 6, 2025.