The Dead Do Not Improve

Aug 01, 2012 Cheryl rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: crime-novel

As part of Hogarth's inaugural list, THE DEAD DO NOT IMPROVE reflects the author's unique voice as a contributor to Wired and editor for Grantland, an online sports and pop culture magazine. This limited focus, however, sets a narrow trail for a mystery novel.

Jay Caspian Kang has captured the stagnating drivel of today's speech where feelings and values must be hidden to be accepted. Kang writes as if his hands are off the wheel, veering from the interstate to why are we here? There are digress...more

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Mar 20, 2013 Dewayne Stark rated it 2 of 5 stars

Another surfing detective. Personally I don't listen to rap but listening to my son's music has exposed me to it. There are plenty of references to rap songs and artists within the novel and also Bod Dylan gets stuck in to. Porno, surfing, the streets of San Francisco, Internet Social Games and Cho-Seung-Hui it is all in there. The dialog bounces between the surfing detective and Philip Kim our Korean story teller. Baby Molester gets shot and Performance Fleece tags up with Kim. Kim uses the cha...more

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Mar 14, 2013 Peat rated it 1 of 5 stars

The title should be "this book does not improve." It starts out OK, a modern pseudo-noir. But the author has a lot he WANTS to say about the perception of Korean Americans and aging hippies and class relations in San Francisco. But it just ends up reading like a bad travelogue following unlikeable protagonists around. And then stuff happens for no reason, and no one cares, and the end. The characters don't learn or change or really have anything happen to them. They just follow the plot string u...more

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Oct 09, 2012 Terryn rated it 3 of 5 stars

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October 9, 2012
Book Review: The Dead Do Not Improve

I will read anything. The phone book, the back of a cereal box, those creepy proselytizing pamphlets you find at bus stops, it doesn’t matter. Even if it’s boring I will give (almost) any printed word a whirlHowever, it frustrates me when I expect something to be a savory, sumptuous read and it doesn’t deliver what I want. This is how I felt after reading Jay Caspian Kang’s “The...more Home
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October 9, 2012
Book Review: The Dead Do Not Improve

I will read anything. The phone book, the back of a cereal box, those creepy proselytizing pamphlets you find at bus stops, it doesn’t matter. Even if it’s boring I will give (almost) any printed word a whirlHowever, it frustrates me when I expect something to be a savory, sumptuous read and it doesn’t deliver what I want. This is how I felt after reading Jay Caspian Kang’s “The Dead Do Not Improve”. Kang writes for Grantland, and I really enjoy his essays – they’re incisive, thoughtful, a little bit irreverent, all around pretty dope. So I was cised to get his book and support another writer of color, just to see what he had to offer. And while he has a unique voice and I love Kang’s non-fiction work, the novel left me craving more. Below are my lamentations:

I was confused – Let me clarify: I was more confused than I normally am. This was supposed to be a crime/murder novel with hipster leanings, set in San Francisco, but the whole time I could not figure out what was going on. Philip Kim, the main character, is the neighbor of an older woman who is mysteriously killed, and finds himself on the run because he think he might be next. Apparently he upset somebody (?). The trouble is that it was hard to understand why anyone would want to kill Phillip (he’s not that popping or interesting enough to kill, IMO). It’s also not easy to follow all the people in the book and get a good grasp on who did what, and what their connection was to murder. There were also reflections on race/minority status (Philip is Korean), relationships, hip-hop culture, dating, the Virginia Tech shooting, and the liberal culture in San Francisco. The book switched between Phillip’s first person account of his life on the run, and the third person view of Siddharta Finch, the detective responsible solving the murder. Flipping between the two narrative styles was a bit jarring. By the time I got to the end of the book I didn’t really care if they found the killers or not, I just wanted the book TO TELL ME WHAT HAPPENED so my brain wouldn’t explode. It was just too much.

The characters got on my nerves – So, I mentioned Philip Kim, who falls for this chick Ellen who is supposed to be some east-coast fleece wearing elitist who recently gentrified his neighborhood. Ellen is on the run with Phillip because he somehow managed to get her mixed up in the murder situation and she has to flee with him. Phillip was annoyingly mopey, and so THIRSTY for this Ellen girl that I worried that she wasn’t really worth it. It felt like he worshiped her whiteness more than telling me what was so special about her. At least let her be fly! At least let her be interesting! He made her seem like some Vera Bradley wearing chick who liked to bounce from minority to minority, sampling men like an international buffet. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I did dig Siddharta’s character. He loved his wife, he loved his job, he surfed – a standup guy. His partner Jim Kim was a hard ass, which is cool because he’s a detective and that’s what detectives are, firm in the buttockal region. Outside of those main characters there were miscellaneous miscreants, heavy-breasted hippie women, surfers, fat men, and homeless people. I can’t tell you exactly what all they were doing, but they were there doing something.

San Francisco seems ass – San Fran was a place that I always wanted to go: I imagined streets paved in Rice-A-Roni, super mellow inhabitants, great book shops. And then my homegirl went there and reported back – people are overliberal, it’s cold, there ain’t no black people. At least Kang seems to have gotten the liberal condescension right in “The Dead Do Not Improve.” Reading the book made me leery of ever booking my flight northwestward. I don’t think there would be any people that I could connect with in that city, with all its dot com millionaires and activists and granola types. The “anything goes” spirit of the city that comes across in this book as creepy and seedy. I guess I’m not as free-wheeling and laissez-faire as I want to believe *womp womp*.

So that’s it, those are my thoughts on “The Dead Do Not Improve”. Not my fave, but I can’t fault Jay Caspian Kang for not writing a book that I enjoyed – there very well may be some people who this story spoke to, it just wasn’t me. As a writer you can’t please everyone with your work.(less)

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Aug 26, 2012 R. B. rated it 5 of 5 stars

The Silver Jews' song "Tennessee" is a funny, punny, sad song about sad people who blame who they are on where they aren't (Nashville) as much as on where they are (Louisville). The song grapples with Big Truths by being ultra-specific. It plants a flag in a moment and uses that moment to implicate us--the listeners--in our failures but still hope that tomorrow might somehow be different. Kang took the title of his book from "Tennessee": "You know Louisville is death / We've got to up and move /...more

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Aug 09, 2012 Holly rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012, disappointing-reads, review-posted

I usually skip writing reviews of books I don't like. But, since this book was provided in exchange for a review...here goes.

To be blunt, I didn't like anything about this book. There were no likable characters. Not one. The plot was disjointed and pointless. The writing style was self-indulgent. It was just a mess.

The main character decides to investigate the murder of a neighbor he can't stand (whom he lovingly nicknames "Baby Molester") after she is killed by a stray bullet while she sleeps....more

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Apr 16, 2013 Sheri rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: male-female-power-sex-attractivenes, poverty-class-issues

I don't feel like I have the cultural capital to understand and like a book like this. I felt like it was trying for a modern (2000s) version of High Fidelity, but it just fell short for me.

As a middle class white girl, I know I'm not really allowed to talk about race, but Kang felt like he was just whining a lot here. I found it funny that he aspired to be treated as the Jews: "'We were talking about Jews, man. Koreans as the new Jews. When white people have to stop feeling guilty about you and...more

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Jun 20, 2012 Beatnik Mary rated it 4 of 5 stars

http://www.cozylittlebookjournal.com/...

It's rare that a book makes me laugh out loud but this one really did. Our hero, Philip Kim, is an over-educated and under-published writer in San Francisco who is so disaffected and self-obsessed that he doesn't even realize his neighbour (apparently nicknamed "The Grey Beaver" in the final edition, but "Baby Molestor" in my advanced galley copy) has been murdered until he stumbles across the news story while Googling himself. Unsatisfied with his limited...more

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Nov 15, 2012 Lisa Beaulieu rated it 3 of 5 stars

Let me say right off the bat, I have no idea - literally none - what happened in this book at the end, how the "mystery" was resolved. And yet, I still liked it very much. It made me laugh out loud at places - I am not sure, but I think that having myself been an east-coast transplant living in SF Bay area made me appreciate the humor more than some might. For instance, he calls his anonymous neighbor "Performance Fleece". If that doesn't make you laugh right now, this might not be the book for...more

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Aug 14, 2012 Larry Hoffer rated it 3 of 5 stars

Jay Caspian Kang's The Dead Do Not Improve is a trippy, kaleidoscopic adventure through San Francisco, with a misanthropic wanna-be writer as its protagonist, and surfing cops, advanced creative writing students possibly with murderous intentions, infamous street protestors, and others along for the ride. It is part murder mystery, part love story, part commentary on our fame- and internet-obsessed society, and part, well, I'm not sure.

Phillip Kim is a disaffected wanna-be writer who scams his w...more Jay Caspian Kang's The Dead Do Not Improve is a trippy, kaleidoscopic adventure through San Francisco, with a misanthropic wanna-be writer as its protagonist, and surfing cops, advanced creative writing students possibly with murderous intentions, infamous street protestors, and others along for the ride. It is part murder mystery, part love story, part commentary on our fame- and internet-obsessed society, and part, well, I'm not sure.

Phillip Kim is a disaffected wanna-be writer who scams his way through his job at an internet support site for men going through tough break-ups. One night, his odd neighbor, aging hippie Dolores Stone (whom he refers to as "The Baby Molester") is killed when she is shot through the window of her apartment. Phillip, who was sleeping during the murder, only finds out about it the next day when Googling himself, and discovers that Dolores was a far more complex person than he even knew. Somehow, Phillip becomes a suspect in Dolores' death (and a subsequent murder) and also a target in an elaborate scheme. He's being pursued by surfing hippie cop Siddhartha "Keanu" Finch (who has more than enough problems of his own) and his partner, Jim Kim, who both run into their own obstacles along the way. And while all of this is happening, Phillip finds himself falling in love.

If the description of this book sounds disjointed and confusing, it's because it doesn't quite follow a linear literary pattern. Jay Caspian Kang has created a vivid cast of complex characters, most of whom aren't what you think they are at first glance, and he takes all of them on a roller coaster ride of an adventure. This book is a little like something by David Foster Wallace (minus the footnotes) with even a little Dave Eggers thrown in for good measure. And while the multiple narrators, pop culture references, surfing lingo, and meditations on ethnic stereotypes may derail the story from time to time, there are flashes of brilliance in this story. There's so much going on at the same time, I found myself utterly confused, but I know that when the book ended, I felt like I had read something completely unexpected. (less)

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May 13, 2013 Brian Grover rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I was surprised at how bad this book was. I've read a fair amount of Kang's stuff on Grantland, and enjoy him as a writer. He can spin a semi-obscure '90s pop culture reference with the best of them (come to think of it, that seems like a requirement for anyone who writes for Grantland), but this book is held together with a threadbare plot that ultimately falls completely to pieces at the end.

I literally don't know what happens in the penultimate scene, other than a handful of characters gettin...more

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Mar 25, 2013 Steven rated it 2 of 5 stars

Someone less familiar with Kang's personal writings might have recognized fewer of his biographical details and thus been able to enjoy his narrative voice without distraction. I've read enough of his Grantland articles to get a sense of his life experiences, though, and I consequently found my attention divided between following the convoluted narrative and filling in more pieces of his personal history.

I respect the effort to try to move beyond thinly veiled autobiography by incorporating a m...more

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Sep 20, 2012 Bennett Gavrish rated it 3 of 5 stars

Grade: C

L/C Ratio: 70/30
(This means I estimate the author devoted 70% of his effort to creating a literary work of art and 30% of his effort to creating a commercial bestseller.)

Thematic Breakdown:
40% - Analysis of modern American culture
20% - Detective mystery
15% - Sex
15% - San Francisco
10% - Literature

In his debut novel, Kang proves himself to be a brilliant writer with mediocre storytelling skills.

He switches from hilarity to poignancy like a master, and perhaps his greatest accomplishment of...more

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Jul 17, 2012 Valentina rated it 2 of 5 stars

This was definitely an unusual book. With a mixture of dark comedy and some clever writing, it definitely captured my attention, although I can’t say it’s one of my favorites of the year.
The main problem I had were the characters, especially the protagonist. He’s just not that captivating. He is kind of wishy-washy, which makes his actions sound weak. Maybe this was done on purpose, but, if so, then it wasn’t clear enough for the reader to really pick up on.
This is one of those books that seems...more

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Jan 08, 2013 Darin Ciccotelli rated it 4 of 5 stars

I've read novels about the struggles of immigrant populations, specifically those that try to balance their original national identity with some new notion of assimilation. But I can't remember a book that was so brash in how it characterized the fully-assimilated. This novel really explores culture difference from such a point-of-view: a young Korean-American San Franciscan who is keenly aware of Seung-Hui Cho and how he has revised Americans' perceptions of Koreans.

Some might dislike the book...more

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Aug 16, 2012 Janice rated it 5 of 5 stars

The main characters in the book are flawed and likeable; we finally have a Korean protagonist that defies the standard asian roles of long standing, muted suffering prescribed by our society. Phillip Kim is spastically, erringly human. He becomes involved in a murder mystery and his story is entwined with that of a disgruntled surfer-detective. At times, both meander through their lives without observation or understanding, while other times they are self loathing, introspective and sentimental....more

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Oct 10, 2012 Terri Light rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Can you like hating a book or can you hate liking a book? Yeah, that. This was all the squidgy parts of Douglas Coupland novels (which I like) and the more-satirical-than-thou pieces of Tom Perotta (which I hate) with a dash of what really, really wanted to be a Hunter S. Thompson memoir or a Coen Brothers screenplay. I was not expecting the Blacksburg portion of the storyline and it was way too much for me, hometown PTSD for me and all.

Honestly, I had a difficult time keeping the cop/surfer sep...more

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Aug 27, 2012 Ryan rated it 3 of 5 stars

This was a strange read. I found myself frequently confused because of the way Kang would write certain passages. He was trying to give the readers the same confused experience of his characters as they wind their way through a layered, mysterious conspiracy. But it didn't work well, it just left me wondering if I had forgotten something or was missing a connection somewhere. Kang had definite talent, and some passages were very well-written, including the finale where, at last, some things happ...more

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Dec 13, 2012 Danny rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: listened-to, library-book

Uhmm...so...I spent a lot of this book convinced that one of the two main plotlines was a novel being written by a character in the other plotline.

Judging by some reviews I googled, this was NOT THE CASE.

Which goes to show you that some books probably shouldn't be consumed as audio books. (Or that I should pay more attention.)

I did like many of the observations put forth, on life as an Asian American, living in San Francisco, hippie culture, and stuff like that.

I'm also not sure who James was?...more

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Jul 03, 2012 Kathleen rated it 1 of 5 stars

In The Dead Do Not Improve, protagonist Philip Kim inhabits the frightening, seedy underworld of San Francisco, one the tourists never see. When his neighbor, who he calls the “child molester” for no good reason, is murdered, and he unwittingly makes eye contact with a member of a notorious street gang, Kim holes up in a shabby hotel.
At the same time, police offer Sid Keanu Finch, who is investigating the woman’s murder, encounters troubles of his own. When he goes to interview Miles Hofspaur,...more

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Sep 02, 2012 Bandit rated it 2 of 5 stars

I was intrigued by the title and the cover, plus I like to keep up on current fiction. This book was sort of a mized bag, interesting and occasionally very well written, revealing the author's considerable talent for prose, but at the same time somehow unengaging and hollow. There was something about this book, something too trendy, too self aware, too stylized, too convoluted as the plot progressed to really let it shine. Most characters, except for the surfing detective, were just a bit too an...more

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Aug 03, 2012 Jenny rated it 3 of 5 stars

Recommended to Jenny by: ARC

Shelves: story

Korean American Machismo

Liberal-arts-college-educated Philip Kim of Jay Caspian Kang’s debut novel, The Dead Do Not Improve is a Gen X, tight-jeans-wearing, earlier wave gentrifier of the Mission District in San Francisco--apparently now on its “seventh wave”--weaned on the Simpsons, nineties hip hop, nachos from Taqueria Cancun, artisan coffee from Valencia Street shops with one noun names, and artfully poured drinks from obscure Guerreo Street bars. You can’t help but feel like it reads as a h...more Korean American Machismo

Liberal-arts-college-educated Philip Kim of Jay Caspian Kang’s debut novel, The Dead Do Not Improve is a Gen X, tight-jeans-wearing, earlier wave gentrifier of the Mission District in San Francisco--apparently now on its “seventh wave”--weaned on the Simpsons, nineties hip hop, nachos from Taqueria Cancun, artisan coffee from Valencia Street shops with one noun names, and artfully poured drinks from obscure Guerreo Street bars. You can’t help but feel like it reads as a hipster’s guide to San Francisco. Many of his characters are young, cool, Silicon Valley or artistic types who are foodies, plugged into social media, and who understand Thunder Cats references--as much as Kang scorns them you can tell he is also one of them. His older characters also wax poetic about the good old days with such alacrity that you feel like a voyeuristic gentrifier yourself if you take just one step down Valencia Street.

If you’re not familiar with the city then Kang’s constant name dropping may seem gratuitous and the snide asides about gentrification of the Mission won’t be interesting, but for a reader in the know it adds richness to the story. The city isn’t merely a backdrop, it is Kang’s muse and it is San Francisco’s particular intersection of quirk, kink, and sub-cultures that gives Kang full range to wind you through a series of convoluted plot twists which involve a vegan cult restaurant, a bar named to honor a conspiracy theorist, belligerent Ocean Beach surfers, and the Porn Palace. This can all be found within one city’s jurisdiction. This is real folks. Look it up.

The book starts off with the murder of Philip’s neighbor and his accidental investigation of the murder leads him to believe both he and his neighbor are targets of a Latino gang who want to eliminate the incoming gentrifiers. Of course, Philip’s self-obsession might be to blame for this far-fetched theory...

To read the rest of this review go to Hyphen.

“Everything I find funny can be found somewhere in the first seven seasons of the show. Humor is important to human relationships. Therefore, if anyone born in America between 1970 and 1986 does not like or ‘get’ The Simpsons, he/she and I will be missing an integral component to human relationships. Only unhappiness can follow.” I learned it’s okay to let your Simpsons fanaticism deter you from connecting with other people.(less)

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Dec 13, 2012 Conor Olmstead rated it 1 of 5 stars Recommends it for: No One Ever

Shelves: mystery, stupid-stupid-stupid-books

So I picked this book up on a whim. I think I saw it at the Booksmith and the premise sounded good. The idea is it's a mystery that takes place in San Francisco (place I like and have not read many mysteries there). It stars a guy my age and another detective, and says it's supposed to be a contemporary and funny read.

Yeah that was a bold face lie. This was this authors first book and it shows. What they don't mention is that this book is also a deeper read of what life is like in Korean America...more So I picked this book up on a whim. I think I saw it at the Booksmith and the premise sounded good. The idea is it's a mystery that takes place in San Francisco (place I like and have not read many mysteries there). It stars a guy my age and another detective, and says it's supposed to be a contemporary and funny read.

Yeah that was a bold face lie. This was this authors first book and it shows. What they don't mention is that this book is also a deeper read of what life is like in Korean American society. Both protagonists are Korean, which is cool but there is a lot of in depth exposition and explanation about what growing up for a Korean kid is like. While the initial idea is in fact cool the author basically drowns you in details. That aside the "mystery" part is not good. You have this 20 something Korean guy with no motivation and is a hipster writer, finds out his next door neighbor is killed. Somehow this turns into a confusing convoluted story of where he has some how been drawn into this deal where there is a cult...and also goes back to this school shooting involving a Korean person. Honestly I could not understand what was happening half the time. He kept introducing characters but either gave them too much detail or not enough so I could not remember who was who. The kid is an asshole and snarky and is honestly the type of pompous type of kid you would see at any Emerson/Berkley/Mass Art school who is full of himself and you honestly just want to deck across the face, but don't worry even with all his running around and giving exposition on his failed writing attempts and loving of hip hop he still finds some girl to have sex with and then fall in love.

The other main character is a detective, but is also surfer, and that's really all there is to him. It sort of touches upon his troubled marriage but he is literally brought from one plot point to the other by the big bad cult? ( I honestly don't know because I didn't know who was what). He was just bland and uninteresting.

The last gripe I had is this book was painfully trying to show how "current" it was. It was making references to facebook, twitter, iphones, craigslist just everything to show "HEY LOOK IT'S 2011 CANT YOU TELL!" But it was just sort of all over the place.

So yea not a good mystery and not a good book honestly. I can say you can skip this over entirely. (less)

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Dec 29, 2012 Ryan rated it 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed the hell out of this book, despite a few weaknesses, primarily an ending that provides almost no closure for any of the plot's major points. But I found Kang's style contagious and love that he took what is basically a Dashiell Hammet storyline and turned it into an über-modern tale laced with commentary on urban culture, gentrification, ethnic identity and love. I'm not from SF, but I've been there often enough for the novel's take on its gentrification to feel both familiar and deepl...more

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Oct 04, 2012 Monte Peters rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: contemporary-fiction, regional-fiction

If you love San Francisco, then this may be the book for you. It uses the city as the backdrop for commenting on contemporary life (out of town surfers who blog about where the surf is and the rivalry between the locals and the out of towners) outrageous characters associated with San Francisco, and with a 21st century patina of underlying terror in everyday life set in a noir style detective novel. I thought it was interesting half way into it, then the characters began to episodically appear a...more

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Aug 28, 2012 Jeremy FREESE rated it 1 of 5 stars

This book is a mess. One of those novels that by the end you feel like you know the author personally and you loathe him. Switches back and forth between two characters but, especially with all the digressions that read like they are pasted out of the author's notebook, hard to keep track of which is which. So you end up with a plot that is both incoherent and hard to follow, and writing that is uneven throughout. The parts about being Korean in the US are the best, including reflections on the...more

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Feb 28, 2013 Kevin rated it 2 of 5 stars

I think the biggest problem with The Dead Do Not Improve is that it doesn't know what it's about. Either that or that there is no resolution to the "mystery" that is ostensibly central to the novel's plot.
There are two major themes that I think this book is basically "about." One is the disaffectedness experienced by many young people living in this hyperconnected internet era. This is a new and interesting topic, but the novel seems to lose interest in exploring these ideas as the plot thicke...more I think the biggest problem with The Dead Do Not Improve is that it doesn't know what it's about. Either that or that there is no resolution to the "mystery" that is ostensibly central to the novel's plot.
There are two major themes that I think this book is basically "about." One is the disaffectedness experienced by many young people living in this hyperconnected internet era. This is a new and interesting topic, but the novel seems to lose interest in exploring these ideas as the plot thickens. By the end, the story is a kind of updated retread, in the guise of a mystery, of what it means to be an "outsider" (in this case of Korean descent) living in America. Think No No Boy, except instead of WW2, the UVA shootings serve as the central "event" to make the protagonist feel like an inadequate American. It's worth noting that you can hardly compare what happened to Japanese Americans around the time of WW2 to what happened to Korean Americans in the wake of the shootings. I'm not Korean, so I won't pretend to get it, but I didn't even know the shooter in Virginia was Korean until I read this book. Maybe it's a leap to make that tragedy somehow about "Koreanness" is all forms?
You might have noticed that my interpretation only deals with Philip Kim's side of the narrative, and doesn't even touch on police officer Finch. That's because I don't know what to make of Sid Finch. He is essentially a bumbling buffoon of a cop who never knows what's happening around him, until, apparently, at the end of the book he has left the police force and achieved a Buddhist, or "Eastern" awakening. Then he seems to have solved the mystery, but he doesn't deign to enlighten the reader, preferring to imply our solving it on our own will be a kind of purifying zen exercise.
I'm left feeling like the author doesn't even quite know how to connect all of the strands in this mystery. I suspect he, in fact can, but the confusion I sense at the end strikes me as a weakness in the book.
There is some good writing to be found in The Dead Do Not Improve, with some very smart, quotable passages but, unfortunately, problems in the execution of the story ruin it for me.(less)

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Aug 21, 2012 Eric rated it 3 of 5 stars

Makes sense that the author writes for the pop-culture blog Grantland. In the novel, the Korean narrator writes for a web service specializing in post-breakup therapy, getoverit.com. There are funny scenes, lots of cultural insight, some diatribes packaged as narrative interruptions that force a reader to reconsider previous theories before returning to this novel that could loosely be described as a novel about gentrification and the extreme reactions of an anti-tech subculture. I'd be interest...more

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Sep 13, 2012 Randall rated it 3 of 5 stars

Jay Caspian Kang does some writing for sports site Grantland.

I should say, he does some very good writing for Grantland. I like his style and voice. There is a complete dearth of quality sports writing these days, in my opinion, especially longer-form writing.

It would seem Grantland was founded at least partially in the interest of reviving what appeared to be a bit of a dying genre in the fast pace coverage of sports on the web.

While Grantland is only too happy to stray from the path of serious...more

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May 04, 2012 Karl H. rated it 3 of 5 stars

The Dead Do Not Improve is a very odd story with a noirish conspiracy plot and pop culture/English lit references galore. There are some fairly offensive and stupid parts in this book. There are also some good insightful ones. The Dead Do Not Improve is very uneven- if it were a table, it would wobble.

Beginning with the unavoidable, there are just a lot of portions of this book that don’t work. The most obvious example is the very first one- a recent murder victim is nicknamed “Baby Molester” b...more The Dead Do Not Improve is a very odd story with a noirish conspiracy plot and pop culture/English lit references galore. There are some fairly offensive and stupid parts in this book. There are also some good insightful ones. The Dead Do Not Improve is very uneven- if it were a table, it would wobble.

Beginning with the unavoidable, there are just a lot of portions of this book that don’t work. The most obvious example is the very first one- a recent murder victim is nicknamed “Baby Molester” by our narrator at the very start of the book. This name is awful in pretty much every conceivable way. Obviously it’s offensive, but it’s also not funny. The nickname is not really occasioned by anything that makes sense, and it is bequeathed on a character that has been murdered and therefore automatically has our sympathies. Why did Jay Kang choose this bizarre diatribe to start his book, when pretty much any other part of the book was better? This is an example of the biggest problem with this book. The Dead Do Not Improve often seems to be going along swimmingly when suddenly another puzzling juvenile, unsympathetic, unobservant, or unfunny part pops up. I also lost the thread of the plot by the end. I wish the reasons for the events in the climax had been explained a little clearer.

The head-scratcher is that the good parts are just as good as the bad parts were bad. There’s a bit about organic food that I thought was quite good, and a eulogy that I liked as well. The exploration of Korean racial identity and the Virginia Tech shootings is complex and nuanced. The two Kims in the book are neither saints nor stereotypes and this is a good thing. A number of jokes drew smiles, and if nothing else Jay Kang has the “self-hating hipster” character down to a tee. Many of the characters are vividly drawn as well, though not all of them.

I put this book on my to-read list because I read a number of Jay Caspian Kang’s columns on grantland.com. I found his columns often thought-provoking, usually dealing with sports and race in a complex and informed manner. Sometimes I saw flashes of it in The Dead Do Not Improve, but often this book falls short. A puzzling, sometimes rewarding, occasionally frustrating effort.
(less)

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BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13079014-the-dead-do-not-improve?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1330617420l/13079014.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13079014-the-dead-do-not-improve?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]The Dead Do Not Improve by Jay Caspian Kang[/url]

The Dead Do Not Improve

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