John Tottenham

John Tottenham’s prose debut, Service, follows Sean, a bookseller and aspiring writer. His battles against a witless general public are matched in fervour only by his self-doubt. A towering list of successful, younger writers plagues Sean, worrying him that he’s already past it. On top of that, he’s being priced out of an L.A. neighborhood he calls home, a neighborhood being rapidly sanitized, in which public spaces are regularly abused.

Service contains an intriguing meta-fictional hook. After passing extracts of a work in progress onto a young barista, it soon becomes clear that Sean’s attempt and Tottenham’s novel are one and the same. Service is a biting, self-aware novel, a story about failure, taste, and writing in the absence of material privilege.

I talked to John on Zoom recently about his novel, among other things.

Colm McKenna: Do you still feel particularly English after so long in L.A.?

John Tottenham: People always assume I’m completely English, which is fine, but I’m actually more Irish than a lot of people who make a big deal about their Irish ancestry. My ancestral home, Loftus Hall, is the most authentically haunted mansion in Ireland. It’s situated on a very desolate peninsula in County Wexford, which can’t even be reached during the winter.

Are you still working in a bookstore? If so, what’s it like selling your own novel?

I’ve ended up selling my novel to people who don’t know that I wrote it. I’ve even had some celebrities come in and buy it, not knowing that I wrote it, and I haven’t mentioned it. I sort of have a rule about that. I never do. I mean, I sold my books of poetry over the years down there without ever introducing myself. It would be a bit gauche to do so.

Reading Service, I often got the impression that bookselling was the worst possible gig for Sean. He’s surrounded by the accomplishments of others while he can’t even get a draft together. Does that resonate at all?

I was surrounded by books written by people I know personally, or who I’ve been acquainted with in some capacity over the years. That’s all in the novel, isn’t it? That’s the weird thing about talking about this novel in interviews: every aspect of it under discussion is actually discussed much more lucidly in the novel itself, so it’s rather hard to really elaborate upon anything, because it’s all done to death in the book itself.

The reviews I’ve seen of Service have been largely positive, and most of the criticisms have been pre-empted in the novel itself.

They were, but somewhat disingenuously. That safety valve of self-deprecation is a way of getting in the preemptive first blow, but just because you anticipate predictable criticism doesn’t necessarily negate it. The Guardian lambasted it. You know how the bloody English are: once something has a little bit of a buzz going for it there has to be a backlash. The complaints are nearly always about repetition. Ironically, it seems that authors who have a built-in reputation for repetition are automatically respected. Thomas Bernhard, for example, or Samuel Beckett, or Lazslo Krasznahorkai. They’re relentlessly repetitious but they seem to exist in a sphere beyond criticism. Partly due to the form, maybe. When you abandon traditional paragraphs and just have these slabs of prose you automatically get taken more seriously. It’s bizarre.

If Service was, say, your fifth novel, and you already had a reputation for repetition, those criticisms might disappear.

Whatever comes next will inevitably be compared unfavorably to the first novel, and it probably won’t be as good either. I’m very limited and getting more and more so, my imagination dried up years ago. Well, we’ll see what happens.

What’ve you been reading recently?

I just read the last Will Self Novel and loved it. I read Lives of the Saints by Nancy Lehman. I was kindly disposed towards her because she voted my novel her favorite book of the year in the Paris Review last year. I read the complete works of Cyril Connolly, which really blew my mind.

So, you engage with contemporary fiction at least slightly more than Sean?

There’s some line in the novel about how Sean can’t read a novel by anybody who’s younger than him, which automatically rules out most contemporary authors. I keep somewhat abreast of contemporary fiction. I think my taste has become a lot more refined as I’ve grown older. I mean, I don’t have time to read a book that I don’t like anymore. I used to feel this obligation to finish novels that I wasn’t enjoying. Now, if I don’t like something, I’ll throw it across the floor after 20 pages. It’s a complete waste of time reading work that you’re not getting anything out of.

The literary events in the novel are taxing for Sean. How do the real life ones in L.A. compare?

Writing and poetry have become rather fashionable over the last 10 years or so. It seems like there’s a reading every night. It’s become a glamorous thing for young people. The same crowd who used to attend art openings now go to these readings. I don’t think anyone really enjoys it. It used to be that you’d go to an art opening and pretend to take an interest in someone’s work on the wall. That wasn’t very time consuming, but now you have to sit through all these people reading off their cell phones before you get to hang out and drink, which is what they really want to do. Maybe it’s a good thing that it’s more frivolous these days. Why shouldn’t literary readings be fun?

How did the metafictional aspect of the novel come to life?

I don’t know, honestly. Organically. I didn’t think about it much. My writing process is a bit like Sean’s. I make myself sit down and write every day. I enjoy it. One often hears writers complaining about how painful they find it to write. You never hear painters or musicians complain about how painful it is for them to work, but writers frequently moan about it. That lack of pleasure in the work is often palpable when you read it.

I miss seeing the one star Goodreads reviews on your Instagram stories.

I was enjoying that. I haven’t checked Goodreads in months. It became too dispiriting. It seems publishers have this tendency of sending novels out indiscriminately to people on Goodreads with the expectation that they’ll review it, and it goes out to  people whose preferred reading material is John Grisham or Game of Thrones, and they’re completely mystified by my book. It’s amazing how many people don’t have a sense of humor.

On a couple of occasions, I’ve seen Service listed as biography/memoir ahead of fiction.

I mean, it’s quite clearly a word of fiction. If you open it up and see all the dialogue. What do they do with something like On the Road? I mean, that’s never listed as a biography or memoir but it’s more autobiographical than my novel.

The Semiotext(e) and Serpent’s Tail editions of Service have very distinctive covers. The former seems to capture the spirit of Sean stuck at home trying to write, the latter is the bright facade of a bookstore.

The Semiotext(e) cover is from that X album, Under the Big Black Sun. I just love that image, although it should have been tweaked a bit more. It’s too similar to the original. The English edition is completely different. They have an illustration of the exterior of a bookstore on the cover because they thought it would make booksellers promote the novel, and it seems to have worked. A lot of covers seem very generic nowadays. Rarely does a new paperback cover stand out.

Have there been any talk about translating Service?

Several people suggested translating it into French. I think it might be quite difficult to translate some parts of it. In any case, it’ll probably never happen.

The romantic interest in Service feels like a bit of an obligation. Could you talk a bit about that?

The young guy keeps urging Sean to include a female character or have a sex scene. I anticipated getting more flack for not having female characters in a novel, but it’s barely been mentioned.

You’ve been prolific on Substack recently. Do you see platforms like that as decent alternatives to traditional publishing?

It’s definitely a healthy alternative to sending out cold submissions and experiencing a lot of disheartening rejection, but the financial aspect is a bit of an obstacle. I don’t have many paid subscribers. I’m pleased if I can just get free subscribers. I’ve been dusting off these old travel diaries of mine, mostly from the 90s and the early 00s, tidying them up and putting them up on Substack. I’m not documenting all of the travels from those days, only the solo ones. I was a pretty prolific solo traveler.

Specifically in the South, right?

Yeah, but I think almost every area of this country is covered. The one I’m working on now is about Minnesota, the next one will be set in Ohio. I lived in the South for three years. I was obsessed with southern culture, but I kind of got it out of my system.

Are you working on a new novel?

I don’t know. I’m supposed to be. I should be, I guess I am. I mean, I’ve got all this material I need to knock into shape. I got sidetracked working on  these travelogues recently. I’m always working on five or six things at the same time.

Colm McKenna is a writer from Norfolk, England.