“We were wrong, of course, but…when you’re in love and fearing for your life, you accept any scaffolding upon which you can hang your fragile, contingent future.” – Jay Caspian Kang, ‘The Dead Do Not Improve’
Hey, quick rant: just because another writer has done something well does not mean that it is not worth you trying. Ever since I was 17 and Spencer told me no one could write poppunk after Rufio’s MCMLXXXV, I’ve hated this idea1. There’s no poetry after Auschwitz? Really? Respectfully, what makes Nazism, of all the human rights abuses in the history of the world, so special that it gets to be the travesty that kills poetry?2 So when, in this book I’m about to mostly praise, the narrator says, “…after reading Anna Karenina, you realize the futility and clumsiness of any attempt you might make at projecting love, or the concept of love, onto the printed page. He’s just too good at it, and anything you try is doomed to sound silly…” This is untrue. The book I’m reading for next week proves it, in fact. “I can’t do something because Tolstoy did it” is cowardice. You can be a lot of things as a writer—drunk, unemployed, hungry, disappointing—but you cannot be a coward.
What I’ve Been Reading This Week:
A book that I bought when it came out, because I really liked Grantland. A book that didn’t disappoint, but that I read before I knew what I know now about San Francisco, how the rents have gone up, how the Warriors moved there, how right wingers chased out Chesa Boudin, how Gavin Newsom started his terrorism campaign rounding up unhoused people and burning their belongings. A book that, in the 12-13 years since I first read it, I began wondering if it was actually good, or if I just really liked Grantland. Well, in the intervening years, I read/watched Inherent Vice and watched Under The Silver Lake, and I’m ready to call this book—if not good, then the Replacement-Level Novel. I wouldn’t have to explain that to the novel’s baseball-loving narrator, and I wouldn’t have to justify it to the other narrator (a surfing cop who maybe escapes samsara in the final pages). Anyway, if I ever rank all of the novels I’ve read for this blog, this book will be the exact midpoint. I’m talking, of course, about The Dead Do Not Improve by Jay Caspian Kang.
Listen: this book is a hell of a lot of fun. It’s in that Lebowski lineage, that special brand of California noir that, as it’s piling on the very California-specific surrealities and horrors, only seems to make me love California more. We have two narrators: Philip Kim, a Korean-American MFA grad who works for a break-up coaching website called get over it dot com, and a surfing, married-to-a-cool-bartender homicide detective named Siddhartha Finch. A couple of possibly random, possibly accidental, but easy-to-frame-Philip-for murders happen. Thanks to this, we learn about a growing cult threat tied to organic food restaurants, we meet our requisite Jackie Treehorn-knockoff porn magnate, and a man in high heels lip syncs Bone Thugs. Oh, and Philip has a strange, yet more or less understandable, fixation on Cho Sheung-Hui. That last part is pretty courageous writing, although I’m not sure it all-the-way comes together (or if my inability to fully put it all together is my own whiteness, in the way). Somehow, it’s a 250-pager you can bang out in a weekend. Like I said, had fun.
There is so much in this novel, though, that when I say it out loud, doesn’t work. It’s disingenuous to make a cop narrator this sympathetic, even if he is a Point Break reference. The whys and wherefores of the Big Bad Cult seem to overblame directionless trustafarians (maybe the eventual Zisians?) and underblame tech billionaires for the Bay Area’s problems. I genuinely believe the Cho stuff works in each character’s expression of Korean-American male angst/anger, but I am not sure that this is an ethical way to discuss a mass shooter in your novel. I don’t know if the plot makes sense, but then again, I am used to nothing making sense (both in neo-noir and in ‘life in 2025’ terms). And then there’s the R slur.
A note on slurs: I don’t remember where we were on the R slur back in 2012. It was never a slur I used much, which is not a brag. I vaguely remember being like, “yeah Sarah Palin’s right, we shouldn’t say that,” but not having enough convictions to admit to anyone that I agreed with Sarah Palin on anything. Anyway, authors—if you’re not a member of whatever marginalized group you’re having characters say the slurs of, maybe just use different language? Like, when we wrote VINE, we didn’t use the N-word or a descriptor for someone from India to talk about Indigenous Americans. It sometimes felt anachronistic, but better that than the jarring slap of a slur. That’s what slurs do, they slap you out of the page. It’s not like I can’t recover, can’t get past a slur as a reader—to be a reader is to witness, viscerally, how much language changes over time. I’m not saying I’ll stop reading simply because I see a slur. I would just ask writers, when you use a medium made of language, be sure you’re sure of the language.
Anyway, this book was genuinely hard to put down. But is it very good? Do I recommend it? Sort of. I never do this, but I checked out Goodreads, just to see what others thought. I trust Goodreads about as much as I trust Yelp, so not at all, and yet. Many, many people on Goodreads do not like this book. That kinda made me like it more. One review, written this year, said the book rewards multiple readings and distance from 2012. Idk if you need to read this multiple times. Definitely read it if you liked Under The Silver Lake, though.
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? The homie Adrian Sobol (go buy HAIR SHIRT) told me that the artist I was looking for on
What’re you still doing here? Don’t you know that Micah and Brendan have a show? If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. Please don’t drug anyone’s bee pollen smoothie and make them pass out. If you do drug someone’s bee pollen smoothie and knock them out? Well, maybe let them see you topless? This benediction goes for any gender of person. Idk. Not a great benediction, I’m not Petey Pablo. Maybe just go watch Point Break. Sorry you got an email, Chris