Vladimir Girshkin is an unattractive guy in an ugly world. Maybe he's not unattractive, but he's small and has a small dick, a thick Russian accent, a receding hairline, a series of chunky girlfriends, and a puzzled sense of identity. And it's not an entirely ugly world, although New York City is a "long grid of blasted streets," Florida is a "blightscape" and a "boiling darkness," and the year is 1993, the age of "nascent slaughter in the Balkans, the African Horn, the ex-Soviet periphery, and of course the usual carnage in Afghanistan, Burma, Guatemala, the West Bank, Belfast, and Monrovia…" Vladimir is an immigrant. He's 25. He's Jewish. He is the "enduring victim of every practical joke the late twentieth century had to offer and an unlikely hero for our times."

He's also the victim of several beatings and one near-rape in the course of Gary Shteyngart's fantastic, hectic 2002 novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook. The book is filled with crowded places and Glamorous Nerds, and its heedless, unstoppable main character, "not known to traverse a well-defined moral landscape," is the kind of lost, frantic, modern hero you actually rarely find in books anymore. There's something kind of tragic and dislocated and 19th-century about him. It's unclear where he belongs.

The Russian Debutante's Handbook is complex and sad and hard to describe, but it's also funny and specific, filled with people of definite physical bearing. Shteyngart is uniquely good at placing characters in the world. He's brutal to them. He beats them up and feeds them horse tranquilizers. He loves and insults them: An American in Europe looks "like he could have been a rugby player before all this Eastern Bloc a-go-go stuff happened," a guy at a party has "the urgent, piercing gaze of a young German intellectual let loose in an American graduate program," a woman has "what in the Girshkin family would be considered the beginnings of a nose" and each of her thick thighs is "a stanza of socialist realism." His characters stand and sweat and breathe like characters in books rarely do (even when Shteyngart's delivery is offhanded: An old man outdoors is seen "doing some nature stuff with a rose bush, pruning it, perhaps"). The book is an adventure, and has its share of longing and cultural mystery, but the best passages are the quick, bright illustrations of how miserable and thrilling it is to have legs and a body and a beating heart. And to have sex. There's tons of sex. Gentle lovemaking, "sympathetic Antioch College-type sex," forceful screwing ("she was literally screwing Vladimir inside her"), and out-and-out fucking: "Two people just two hundred pounds short of nonexistence burrowing into each other…"

Gary Shteyngart reads from The Russian Debutante's Handbook on Thursday, January 13, at 7:30 pm in the Jewel Box Theater at the Rendezvous (2322 Second Ave). Then I'm interviewing him onstage. It's free. You should come.