Sal is dead. So how could he send an email to his working-stiff brother in Chicago?
source
Somehow, the impossible happens,
though David knows the emails can only be from a hacker who knows him far too well. Who is this intrusive tormentor, and how will David find him?
It's not trivial, re-opening the wounds of a man who's lost his brother.
... there was a grieving process after their death, a personal process that he should have been left to carry out as he saw fit. He tried, but it seemed like with every hug, every card, and every “thought and prayer” someone “sent his way,” the process started over.
The shrink referred to it as a “blackness” inside of him, and after that, David stopped going. It wasn’t black, because black was evil. Black was something.
#GottaLoveSamNeumann!
What an unexpected treat - such a well written and engaging novel, from the Kindle Daily "Free" list. Nobody asked me to read/review this book, but it skyrocketed to the #TopOfMyQueue while I proceeded to Kindle-Share line after great line until I realized I must stop cluttering Twitter and Facebook with these quotable quotes and insights.
David Grasso. Working in a cubicle, living in downtown Chicago, making one snarky, spot-on observation after another about his boss and co-workers. Fans of Dilbert, 30 Rock, The Office, this is your kind of book.
The firm put up a front about a work/life balance and “casual” atmosphere, but this was mostly propaganda used to impress clients and lure fresh recruits.
...you were expected to work. It was probably for this reason that the median age at the firm was thirty-two – even most of the top-level account executives were under fifty. It was a young man’s game, and the company brain trust understood this. Get them while they’re fresh, hungry, and stupid, and get their best years before they decide to leave for a slower pace.
David is not there to socialize:
Friendships were made among the books and beer cans, but were fleeting arrangements of convenience. David worked hard and earned his bachelors in design from Nebraska in three years – he landed his first job while most of his peers were still throwing house parties or sleeping at the library.
Neither is Martin.
"Martin, the skittish accountant that ate lunch alone in the stairwell."
The loner, the quiet little guy people are afraid to be stuck with, in an elevator.
something unintentionally intimate about elevator rides – spending a short amount of time in a small, enclosed space with one or more other human beings, coupled together by chance, not choice. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder in silence and avoiding eye contact, waiting for the ride to be over. Almost all other social interactions call for conversation, even if forced and short lived. But not the elevator. It calls for the opposite; deathly silence, as if to pretend the others in the elevator are not actually there, which always creates a level of awkwardness. And when paired with an oddball coworker, the awkwardness is only amplified.
Love, love, love the guy. And his secret life as a fisherman. And his love of jazz:
Martin loved jazz, he said. He actually had been playing saxophone for over ten years, though he didn’t pick it up too often anymore. He recited a list of the top five jazz clubs in Chicago. A prolific list.
David sometimes faces things like "emotions," in the dark of night, but he doesn't like himself in the morning:
He was alone in the darkness, and alone he could think these things, free from the scrutiny of the real world and its rules. The night was his friend. But the morning came, and the real world returned and washed these things away. He arose and looked out his window, trying to figure out how he could’ve had those conscious thoughts just seven hours before. They were ridiculous and embarrassing.
The corporate handbook helps guys like him fit in, but not really:
The handbook included all sorts of official rules and procedures, but also an entire section on the “culture” of JF&A, filled with such things as “best practices” for “building community” in the office.
Neumann gives us plenty of guys to 'hate' if we name names here (it's fiction, right?):
Todd would nod, frown, scribble on a notepad – anything to give the impression he understood, despite the fact that he almost certainly did not.
Abe, the lonely widower who faithfully invites David to dinner once a week.
Without really noticing, David began opening up to Abe. The old man’s apartment was a safe haven, a place of solitude, where positivity and warmth and smells of food and wine all swirled together in a thick air of acceptance. He couldn’t help but take a liking to the man – Abe cooked him dinner and served him wine and in return only wanted conversation. It was refreshing, and it was good.
Like Martin, like every person in the novel, Abe is vivid, authentic, clearly drawn, and all in as few words as necessary. This author doesn't bore us with back story or too many details.
Erica, the co-worker who's "out of my league," David believes, so he keeps hiding his feelings from her, even if he risks looking a tool who couldn't care less about her.
Sal, the brother who emails David from heaven. All the other characters who get drawn into this mystery. The hacker. Great, great, memorable scenes. This should be a movie.
The fishing trip. The gray days in the city. The gray moods David can't shake. The frustration of not finding answers to those age-old questions life throws at us.
E.g.
A skeptic is by nature a doubtful person who has an infinitely easier time disproving a theory than accepting one. A skeptic does not even begin to entertain the notion of absolute truth until a battery of tests have been satisfied...
Their mother forced them to attend church, in children, but...
When David left home for college, he told Sal he’d never go to church again. Sal promised the same. It was a waste of time, they decided, time that could be better spent sleeping off a hangover. None of it was real – it was all based on a manufactured deity created by people that were scared of dying and too dumb to realize it. People trained to go to a building every week and pretend to talk to a ghost and follow an arbitrary set of rules.
David is forced to rethink all that he "knows" about the world, and one of the best ways to learn what's real is to leave behind the office desk and do things outdoors. The misfit, Martin, is a master at so much that David never experienced. E.g.,
There’s something about working with your hands…making something for someone. Creating something out of nothing. Taking a raw material and turning it into a beautiful piece of wood. There’s a spirit to it, really.
Here is one wee little spoiler, but the process is what keeps us turning pages:
David had tried so hard to keep every aspect of his private life covered up for most of his life...Now that he was talking, and talking a lot, all of a sudden, it made him feel free. Like he was dumping the weight of it off into Lake Michigan, just by opening his mouth.
Here is part of the publisher's blurb:
The email claims to be from his brother, but David knows it can’t be, because his brother is dead.
Upon reading the body text he becomes furious, not at the obvious attempt at deceit, but at what the email says. Furious someone would use his brother’s name to perpetuate a lie. Furious the lie existed at all.
EMAILS FROM HEAVEN is a novel following David Grasso’s struggle to make sense of the email and those that followed. As a graphic designer at a high-powered ad firm in downtown Chicago, David spends most of his waking hours at the office. He’s unmarried, has few friends, and his coworkers bore him. His life is a monotonous running clock. But when the email arrives, his world is turned on end, and he will go to any length to reveal the source and explain the seemingly inconceivable circumstances that led to it showing up in his inbox.
It's harder to write a review about a great novel than a mediocre one, or a predictable one. This novel fits no formula or genre that lets us know in a word what to expect. It's full of surprises - wrenching and painful ones, yes, but ultimately, surprising victories (however small or big) and that thing so hard to find in today's fiction, the thing Emily Dickinson nailed in "hope is the thing with feathers." I love this story, this author.
Again, nobody asked me to review this book. Normally I blitz through the first page of a half dozen novels a day. Many look good, sound good, but don't hook me. This one, I couldn't put down until I'd gotten to the end. For me, that's exceedingly rare.
More please!
and Amazon purged all my reviews, a thousand+, and a year later they've restored none of them. Manually, if I can find any trace of the original review, I repost, but do this for a thousand books and gadgets? Not happening.
About Sam Neumann
Sam Neumann is the New York Times bestselling author of three novels and one work of nonfiction, plus various rants and rambles that can be found on his blog.
He grew up in rural Chisago City, Minnesota, and ambled through a handful of states before arriving in Denver, Colorado, where he now resides. In his free time, he's often hiking, snowboarding, or walking his fluffy dog Nikko.
Sam's fiction has been described as "psychological thriller with a literary bend" and often blurs the line between mystery, thriller, and noir.
He's had more jobs than he can count, but most notable are the summer he spent as a gas station attendant in Alaska and the two days he worked at Cold Stone Creamery in Ames, Iowa.