Finishing Last

Gracie Hadland relates to John Tottenham’s “Service.”

By Gracie HadlandOctober 29, 2025

• Fiction

EVERY WRITER has a routine for getting ready to start thinking about beginning to write. Reading, note-taking, conducting research, editing discarded projects, napping, showering, cleaning, exercising, masturbating, drinking, talking to people, looking out the window—though it might look like procrastination, these activities, often conducted in a certain ritualized manner, are designed to contribute to the eventual act of writing. Rather than a diversion, this kind of preparation is inherent to the writing itself, necessary to get the writer into, and keep her in, “the zone.” It’s as productive as putting pen to paper. Really. The indulgent writer may even consider this the most sacred, most mysterious aspect of writing, as it happens in the slim space between doing something and doing nothing. The danger, of course, is that this preparation might take up hours, days, or, if one is not careful, years.

Sean, the narrator of Service (2025) by John Tottenham, has been working on a book of one kind or another for almost 25 years, much of that time engaging in just such rituals, reading the work of others, taking baths, listening to music, “never just ‘writing,’ always ‘attempting’ to write.” He has justified all the stopping and starting by harboring the expectation that it’s leading toward an eventual work. Now, with only “dusty piles of notes, palimpsests in progress, discarded drafts, [and] abundant abandoned works” to show for it and with his autumn years on the horizon, he panics at the possibility that he may never complete anything. Even worse, if he doesn’t, it’s unlikely anyone will notice.

Sean’s discarded projects include a lengthy treatise on prewar country blues lyrics and more than one collection of poems; there was “an aborted fifty-thousand-word novel […] and a discontinued novel of comparable length about an aging hack attempting to write a novel.” He reprimands himself for his indulgence, what he calls “this endless supposed honing of my craft compounded by the preposterous conceit that the torturous process of giving shape to my thoughts might actually serve some sort of purpose, when it is merely an excuse to immerse myself in a morbidly self-reflexive haze.” He asks how it has come to this. What has held him back? But also, what’s the point? With no one waiting for a book, no contract or publisher or deadline—why bother? “What would happen if I didn’t do it?” he asks. “Nothing. Nobody would notice. It wouldn’t make any difference to anybody.” Where does one find the strength or hubris or obsession to write when the stakes are such? How does one find that extra drive to complete something? Service is built on the obsessive repetition of these questions that ring in the ears of every writer, its metanarrative—a book about writing a book—illustrating the sometimes banal, always precarious, rarely rewarding conditions of the writing life.

Compounding his sense of inadequacy, Sean is surrounded in his daily life by the products of that strength or whatever it is he lacks. He works as a bookseller at an independent bookstore, haunted by all those who have achieved what he has not. If nothing else, they finished something. There’s the adage that “those who can’t do, teach.” Here, it is “those who can’t write books sell them.”

To escape confrontation with his failure, Sean vows to stop trying altogether. On page 17, he announces his decision to give up writing, a declaration that is, of course, inflected with irony, as the reader holds in her hands a book with 310 pages to go. He entertains the idea of spending time on activities other than writing, but what else is there? “I could go somewhere, I could do something,” Sean says. “But I didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything.” The attempt not to write doesn’t last very long. (This is a classic conceit, one I’ve used: trick yourself into writing by making writing the thing you’re not to do.) He starts back at square one: “Maybe this is where I can finally begin, with the conviction that I have nothing to say.”

The main action of Service happens at the bookshop, where Sean must suffer fools constantly. It is located in the L.A. neighborhood of Echo Park, where Sean has been a resident since long before it became a haven for young creative professionals with “mass-produced bohemian lifestyles.” Now he serves these new residents and the day-trippers, enduring their cheery small talk, their excitement at the novelty of being in a bookstore, their ridiculous appearances (“A bald, beaming clown face with an intricately groomed beard and mustache bobbed up in front of the counter and stood there staring at me, spittle hanging from his lips”) and their idiotic questions (“Do you have any books on trolls?”; “Do you have any Plato like Dialogues or anything?”; “Do you have a garbage can back there?”). With this constant cacophony of demands, Sean can’t help but embody the picture of the snobbish middle-aged man working in retail. He is the foil for the customers’ unbearable perkiness, sometimes getting into arguments, exchanging insults with patrons. He is the recipient of a number of bad Yelp reviews. But it’s hard to blame him for his attitude. Encountering the novel’s descriptions of Sean’s life outside the store, his lonely nights reading in the bath, drinking whiskey, listening to sad junkie music, trying to write, the reader sympathizes with the loser. In contrast to the silence and focus he tries to achieve when writing, the scenes of interactions at the store are jarring and occasionally agonizing, even if terribly funny in Tottenham’s sardonic voice.

Sean is perhaps a thinly veiled version of Tottenham himself, who will be familiar to Echo Park locals and bookstore-goers as the gaunt, jittery Englishman who sits at the front desk of Stories Books & Cafe on Sunset Boulevard on Mondays and Fridays. Tottenham has been a stalwart among a group of musicians, writers, artists, and freaks who founded a kind of bohemia in Echo Park in the 1990s. He often participates in readings, reciting misanthropic and self-lacerating verse in a humorous monotone.

With his declaration that writing is pointless, the very thing he should avoid, Sean succeeds in tricking himself toward completing a manuscript, one that resembles the book we are reading, a novel about a miserable, aging bookshop employee attempting to write a novel. “The self-conscious novel is a lower form of literature,” he laments, “but it’s all I’m capable of.”

Sean begins to confide in an unnamed younger man whom he enlists to read the draft, to edit and advise. The two discuss the ways the book should go and how to avoid the traps of cliché. This is where Service becomes a bit overly self-aware. Sean (and Tottenham) anticipates potential “woke” criticisms that, for example, the author is just a misogynistic old angry white guy. By acknowledging them, he seeks to absolve himself of the charges, admitting that he’s aware of how he might come across. While there’s an honesty in these moments, there’s also a cloying sense of trying to get to the reader, as if to say, “I know what you’re thinking.”

Service is at its best when Tottenham delves into the creative process and the inexplicable and existential urgency that drives his characters to work. Through exorbitant self-deprecation, Sean arrives at something like an accommodation between futility and necessity, an almost earnest appreciation of finishing as an act of compromise. “With so much unfinished, so much unbegun, nothing, no matter how worthless, can be thrown out anymore,” he says.

I have to complete something, even if it is ignoble of sentiment and unsound of construction; even if it’s not up to the standards of what I once threw out; even if it is the exact opposite of what I had once hoped to achieve—that I was probably never capable of achieving in the first place; even if it reflects badly upon me; even if it is crap.

The book captures the reality of life as a committed writer, someone who has chosen to devote himself to self-expression (in a slow, maybe antiquated medium) even if it means debt and humiliation. It demonstrates the crushing nature of having a day job, the pain of having to serve others and rely on their patronage for one’s livelihood, despite Sean’s job being supposedly painless, working with the thing he loves and even with people he likes. Sean is driven mad by his employment. Working at the bookshop not only confirms his failure; it also takes time away from the real work, the writing he should be doing, yet the bookstore and its agonies become the subject for the novel. In a way, a writer needs something to work against; the frustration is generative, or at least able to be subsumed by the book. Writing is a parallel activity.

Last fall, I was fired from an independent bookstore. I was told by the owner that I didn’t have the personality for retail. He was right; I don’t. I received a bad Yelp review (okay, a few). The Yelpers often went beyond criticizing my customer service skills to commenting on the nature of my “dreadful appearance” and questioning my sanity. Once, I was chastised in person by a woman for not saying “thank you” or shaking her hand or whatever she wanted; her schoolteacher tone I can still remember. Working there, I had adopted the archetypal attitude of the aloof and blasé bookstore clerk—something that the owner possessed and which I began to emulate (men can get away with it much easier than women). I was never intentionally rude, but I never felt comfortable being overly friendly, breathing down customers’ necks, as if I were selling cars on commission. It was painful, nearly impossible for me to be polite beyond a degree of civility, especially to the people who marched in from the farmers market with their straw baskets, acting like the city was a small town and Sundays were for strolling the boulevard and having brunch. Though at first I felt it was the one job amenable to struggling writers, I came to realize that retail is actually the worst place for them: writing is about telling the truth, and to sell things, you have to lie, at least a little bit. At one point in Service, Sean is accused by a customer of hating everything, to which he retorts: “As a result of liking some things so intensely, there are other things I dislike intensely.” His bitterness, and I’d like to think mine, comes not from contempt for people but from frustration with a world that passes you by while you are sitting on something important to say, which you can’t while stuck behind a cash register.

Eventually, Sean is fired from the store after a violent outburst in which he throws the entire philosophy section on the floor and screams at customers to go away. But we glimpse a hint of success perhaps to come: his amiable boss, who has started to work as a literary agent, offers to look at the manuscript and show it to publishers. Of course, a success has already been achieved; Tottenham has finished and published the book the reader holds in her hands, and he now joins his peers on the shelves, his message extending beyond the barrier of the cash register. I couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride, of hope, of affection for the cantankerous bookseller at having completed and published a work of substance, which we know now, if we didn’t before, is no small feat.