Service
John Tottenham
Belletristik/Erzählende Literatur
Beschreibung
In his late forties, John, a failed journalist and failing novelist, finds himself working at a bookstore in a rapidly gentrifying Los Angeles neighborhood, 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 longtime ambition of writing a novel into a hilariously cathartic litany of contempt for his present circumstances. In between chasing noisy cellphone 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 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.
Rezensionen
So heartfelt that we find ourselves howling with laughter because, despite his best efforts, John Tottenham writes with a rare comic intensity and re-creates himself in the guise of an unforgettable character in fiction
The weariest bohemian, with a Keatsian death-drive he somehow keeps outliving, John Tottenham is my favourite nihilistic romantic
Kundenbewertungen
los angeles, 84 charing cross road, ben lerner, bookshop books, shaun blythell, diary of a bookseller, novels by poets