Slacking Toward Bethlehem

Service by John Tottenham. Semiotext(e), 328 pages. 2025.

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’ ska band The Gadjits had been gigging around Kansas City, Missouri, when they suddenly got signed to Rancid’s label Hellcat. As class started, Ms. Philips popped in her son’s 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’t a proud parent boasting about her kids’ 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 “make it.” No. In fact, Ms. Philips played the album so we could help her understand her boys’ incomprehensible decision: The Gap, according to Ms. Philips, had offered her sons $10,000 to star in a commercial, and they refused.

“My sons said, ‘We don’t care how much money they pay us,’” Ms. Philips told us, shaken. “They keep saying, ‘We won’t sell out!’”

These days it’s difficult to imagine any artist, of any genre, coming to a similar decision as The Gadjits. In twenty-five years, “selling out” has gone from artistic taboo to artistic aspiration. And though I sometimes long for that punky spirit to reanimate our culture, it’s 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’re cast into the attention economy, a Hobbesian jungle dominated by the whims of tech billionaires. In The Gadjits’ more genteel era, when it was still possible, if not easy, to earn a living as an independent artist, fans fiercely drew lines around “uncompromised” art and rewarded—or penalized—artists 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.

This distant memory of The Gadjits, and the even more remote discourse around “selling out,” came back to me while reading John Tottenham’s 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’s 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 “content,” and the endless reel of advertisements, thirst traps, food porn, and atrocities we spend entire days scrolling through.

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.

From behind the register of an LA bookshop, Service’s narrator Sean Hangland nurses an endless array of resentments. He’s 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’s 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 café-bookstore Stories). Service is peppered with vignettes of his truculent on-the-clock behavior:

A mild-mannered young regular wandered in and stood in front of the counter, smiling, awaiting some sort of acknowledgement.

“You look happy,” I said.

“I think I am,” he said.

“Well, keep it to yourself. It might be contagious.”

He moved along to the coffee counter.

“Hey.” Another smiling customer stood there.

“Yes.” I stifled a snarl.

“What’s this book about?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t read it.” Am I supposed to read every book in this store in order to save you the trouble? Why don’t you open it yourself.

Hangland’s bitterness is rooted in deeper class resentments. Many of the “bohemians” who pop by gloat about mysteriously funded real estate purchases, blockbuster film deals, and younger, trust-funded girlfriends. He’s broke and stuck in the decidedly dying industry of literature, while everyone else seems to be surging into the future.

Tottenham, who has previously published four volumes of poetry, pays acute attention to language, giving Sean a Victorian-style vocabulary that highlights the narrator’s 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’s disgust with reality, adding to the sense of friction I mentioned earlier.

And yet it’s difficult feeling too bad for Sean. By his own admission he’s a pill popper and a boozer, a procrastinator, a mediocre employee, and in decades of writing hasn’t 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. “I was disciplined enough to sit down to write on an almost daily basis but rarely disciplined enough to spend that time actually writing,” he admits.

Unlike his friends and rivals, no one offers Sean the opportunity to sell out, but that’s 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’s friendly with established writers and artists, Sean’s insecurities lead him to seek feedback instead from a young Mute Books coworker we only know as “the boy.” At first, Sean’s manuscript impresses the boy, giving Sean the courage to continue writing. Slowly, however, the boy’s critiques sharpen, until they cut to the heart of Sean’s creative conundrum, and draw blood:

 “You have three or four characters that serve the same purpose. . . . They’ve compromised themselves professionally or romantically or whatever; they’ve cut deals, whereas you . . .”

“The protagonist,” I said.

“Whatever,” said the boy. “He has integrity . . . You’re always measuring his failure and integrity against other people’s success and supposed lack of integrity.”

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 “if something’s popular, it’s usually crap.” 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’s impulses—his integrity and his indolence—that lead him to write but also paralyze his creative potential. It’s 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’s yet another mediocre hack.

Tottenham inflames Sean’s neurosis through the question of labor. Money, specifically the lack of it, fuels Sean’s creative anxieties. Unlike seemingly everyone else in LA’s 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’s 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. “Prospectors and profiteers” destroyed the city, and even “ordinary pleasures and consolations that used to be taken for granted, like coffee and beer, were now fetishized.”

Not that Sean’s an anti-gentrification activist or a dues-paying member of the tenant’s union. He’s far too misanthropic for anything so socially minded. Any interaction whatsoever with the “relentless barrage of humanity” 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’s Slacker (1990), Kevin Smith’s Clerks (1994) and Stephen Frears’ High Fidelity (2000), stories where protagonists brimming with culture and intellect—characters like Sean—sputter under the weight of their own mediocrity. “I had turned into one of those people I used to fear,” confesses Sean. “One of those sour and angry old booksellers or record-store clerks who intimidated me as a youth.”

As Service progresses, Sean’s attempt to write his book, despite his own deteriorating economic and emotional state, sparks a metafictional discourse about the writing of Service itself. Sean’s 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’s 328 pages:

“Unfortunately, I have to get it out of my system and actualize myself before I die,” I said, the desired apathy having slipped away.

“What do you mean by ‘actualize myself’?” said Jackson, leerily.

“You know, to externalize yourself, to bring forth what is within, to get it out of your system, and into other people’s systems; to provoke, console, inspire, if it’s within one’s means. . . . Then, for some, I suppose, there are material rewards. I’m not expecting that.”

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’s quaint, certainly it’s naïve, but in a world where “selling out” is so common that we no longer even recognize it as selling out, Sean’s motivations, and his curmudgeonly outlook on life, feel urgent and all the more charming.

Tottenham knows better than to romanticize artistic purity without revealing its consequences, however. In 2025, few writers—or bands or artists—can keep the lights on with their art. Now selling out has become a luxury, something only the wealthy can afford—perhaps why it’s 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—a reality that drives Sean to the brink of madness. 

This dichotomy comes into focus toward the end of Service, when Sean’s creditors catch up to him and garnish his wages at Mute Books. While calculating how he’ll 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:

“Is this like some sort of joke?”

“Yes, it’s 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 ‘like,’ you’re over the age of twelve.”

For a character so proud of his offline life, who believes it’s yet another mark of his integrity, Sean ironically falls victim to one of the darker punishments of the chronically online: the meltdown video. “A 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.” He snaps and, instead of shelving books, starts hurling them at customers. “There were books all over the floor—Kant, Kierkegaard, Locke, Montaigne, Nietzsche—the wisdom of the ages scattered in rage and sadness.” Unsurprisingly, he’s fired.

Seemingly everyone in Service “grows up”: the boy giving Sean feedback quits Mute Books to pursue music, Sean’s 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. “Was this piece of overwrought middle-aged juvenilia something I’d want to read?” Sean reflects of his own work. “Frankly, no. It would probably annoy me.”

Some principles, it seems, are worth clinging to, not because they lead us to success but paradoxically because they don’t.