Service (1982)

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A darkly comic novel set on the lower slopes of the Los Angeles literary world. I stepped out to behold a crimson-streaked sky that would soon be adorning ten thousand Instagram posts, and walked down the sleepy residential streets, suffused with a soft and forgiving evening light, to the main drag. It felt like the end here, both sanctuary and termination: a soft place of harsh realities where a sun that once meant something barely brushed against the world. The perfect spring evening was blighted only by the citizenry. A journalist in his late forties—having lost his job as a consequence of the death of print media—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