THE DEAD DO NOT IMPROVE By Jay Caspian Kang Hogarth, 250 pp., $25 Graduate of a prestigious writing program, Philip Kim puts his fiction aside to take a job at a sketchy internet start-up (he’s better off than his classmate, who ends up “teaching creative writing at a school for the criminally insane”). In Jay Caspian Kang’s San Francisco, underemployment is a mark of privilege, as is living in the imperfectly gentrifying Mission neighborhood, where coffee shops play “barrel-aged indie rock” and hipsters compare street crime tales. When Kim’s elderly white neighbor is murdered, most of his friends chalk it up to Latino gangs, but Kim suspects a deeper conspiracy is at work. In Kang’s loopy, hilarious, neo-noir novel, Kim proves abundantly correct. Here, a quick-paced Hammett-esque plot structure supports a cast of strippers, surfers, slackers, cult members, and cops. Along the way, Kim meets a woman he calls Performance Fleece (for her outerwear), whose New England preppiness entrances him: “She, like all sturdy girls from Boston, knew just enough about the Red Sox to carry on a conversation, but not enough to raise concern.” As their romance unfolds, so does the novel’s subtle inquiry into race, class, love, and violence. If the book doesn’t completely hang together (it doesn’t), it’s nevertheless an extremely smart, funny debut, with moments of haunting beauty.
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