Cervantes was in his late fifties when Don Quixote first appeared in print. Defoe was around the same age when he dreamed up Robinson Crusoe and produced what’s often considered the first novel in English. In his early fifties, Samuel Richardson decided on a career change and wrote Pamela. Someone ought to have provided Sean Hangland, the narrator of John Tottenham’s novel Service, with these pieces of literary trivia. It might have cheered him to discover that several of the originators of the modern novel were even older than him when they burst onto the fiction scene. 

Sean, who turns forty-nine in the course of Service, can think of little besides the damning numerals next to his name. He has nibbled at the edges of literary life for decades, working as a freelance journalist and, more recently, a bookseller, but failing to deliver the ‘major work’ of fiction he’s long expected of himself. Now he finds he’s obsessively checking the birth years of his competitors. ‘The main problem with contemporary authors,’ he says, ‘was that they were nearly always younger than me.’

Mute Books, where Sean works, is in Los Angeles’s Echo Park, ‘the second hippest neighborhood in the country’, according to a ‘major weekly periodical’. Gentrification has done its worst to the area in recent years. Many of the ‘colonisers’ responsible turn up in Mute, where they talk loudly on their