The tagline of Norval Corporation --
I received this book from LibraryThing (LT) as an early reviewer. I have been remiss in posting my review, and I noticed that I hadn't been on LT in a while. Google Sheets is now the place where I catalog my books, on a spreadsheet that only I can access. Many of the BookTubers on YouTube use GoodReads (GR), but when Amazon bought it, I lost interest in using GR. It is easy to put a book in your library there and get statistics if you record when you have completed a book, but that seems too much like feeding your information directly to Big Brother. I started using LT long before GR, and I think I'll continue to use and promote LT.
End Man is set in 2030, and Austin makes this future world plausible. Raphael works for a company called Norval that obtains the rights to the online remains of people who have died. They then sell that data to family and friends who want to remember the ones they have lost.
However, there are Blanks and possums, both of whom are trouble for Norval's bottom line. Natural Blanks are kids that die too young to have an online presence, and so are safe from exploitation. On the other hand, Intentional Blanks, or Digital Luddites as they are sometimes called, purposefully choose to not use technology so that they don't have a digital footprint and, if the corporation can be believed, are also sabotaging infrastructure to push their agenda. Raphael is an End Man, that is, he investigates whether a person is dead or playing possum. Possums have faked their death and are living off the grid, usually because they are hiding to avoid prosecution or are hiding from family or foe. There is no law against being a possum, but Norval can't profit from their online data if they are still alive.
The dead surround Raphael and his Necrology Department colleagues every moment of the workday, but Raphael has other ghosts in his life. Suffering from a form of dromophobia, the fear of crossing streets, Raphael has spent his life limited to a square mile of Los Angeles between Fairfax, Beverly, Wilshire, and La Brea, almost a perfect square. Within that boundary, he has grown up, gone to school, learned to skateboard, and got his job in an art deco building at the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax, working for Norval. His mother was an artist who worked for the LA County Museum of Art, which is between Norval and the La Brea Tar Pits; however, she died young, and Raphael now lives in the apartment he grew up in. Raphael shares her interest in art and uses oil painting as a form of therapy.
The problems all start when Maglio, the CEO of Norval, shows a particular interest in a suspected possum that Raphael is investigating, a physicist working in quantum mechanics who committed suicide. Both Raphael and another End Man, Matt, start seeing odd things around the office, and while they have unlimited access to online data, they are finding files that are closed to them. The night custodian at Norval tells Raphael about the ghosts he hears when he is cleaning near R&D, and a homeless woman named Pink tells him that he must run because he only has 13 days. But 13 days to do what? And where can he run if he can't get out of his square?
Early on, Austin introduces quantum physics analogies, like Schrodinger's cat, to illustrate that End Men are trying to determine whether a suspected possum is dead or alive, but that sometimes being able to know the living/dead state of the possum depends on whether you can open the box or not. We also hear about the Ghost in the Machine, which leads us to believe that the custodian's ghosts might not be ghosts. Raphael's job requires him to determine if a person is truly dead or not, but what if they are still alive after death?
The premise of End Man is interesting, and Raphael sounds like someone that I'd like to meet. His phobia causes problems for him such as the inability to go to concerts beyond his boundaries and keep a girlfriend once they know his secret, and that makes us sympathetic to him. His skateboard is his constant companion and as much a character as some of the humans.
However, the book was longer than it needed to be. As with many office dramas I've read, it spent too much time on the personality of the floor supervisor and his relationship with his employees. Either from personal experience or from TV, we know the dramas that exist in cube farms. Another tedious section involves a back and forth between Raphael and an Artificial Intelligence about what is better, life or afterlife. And while these aspects reduced my interest in continuing the story, there were other parts that I thought could have been flushed out. Thus, the story had problems with flow and pacing.
I found myself rooting for Raphael to be successful in his work, love life, and artistic endeavors. But the powers-that-be had other plans for him, and it is only because I wanted to know if Raphael could escape from his prison that I led me to finish the book.
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