ho is Vladimir Girshkin? This question -- a similar one drives most novels about a young man's coming-of-age -- hovers over Gary Shteyngart's energetic, ambitious first novel, even as it haunts Vladimir himself. In the long-ago year of 1993 (''the first year when mocking the mainstream had become the mainstream''), in which ''The Russian Debutante's Handbook'' takes place, Vladimir is a 25-year-old graduate of a Midwestern liberal arts college, living with his girlfriend in a cramped East Village walk-up and spending his days toiling as a public-service office peon in ''the most disheveled, God-forsaken, not-for-profit corner of New York's financial district.''

But wait. Stifle that yawn. Yes, this is another book about an overeducated, understimulated Manhattanite making his way through a chaotic, confused moment in history, looking for love, money and meaning. (What's wrong with that, anyway?) But Vladimir is different. When we first encounter him, munching a soppressata-and-avocado sandwich at his desk, we are informed that this young man has a special relationship to history. He is ''the immigrant's immigrant, the expatriate's expatriate, enduring victim of every practical joke the late 20th century had to offer and an unlikely hero for our times.'' Vladimir is a Russian Jew, dragging a passionate Slavic soul and an Ashkenazic sense of the absurd through the bright new American world like a pair of battered, belted leather suitcases. His mother, a maniacal investment banker, has embraced capitalism with the zeal of the converted, while his father, a doctor specializing in insurance fraud, nurses his nostalgia for the mother country in a suburban basement made over to resemble the lost Russian village of his childhood. So Vladimir, equally a child of the Brezhnev age and a Clinton-era 20-something, must grapple with the classic immigrant's identity crisis -- the subject of novels from ''The Rise of David Levinsky'' to ''The Joy Luck Club'' -- in particularly disorienting circumstances.

The world Vladimir inhabits is at once familiar and surreal; ''The Russian Debutante's Handbook'' is like a precisely measured map drawn by one of Nabokov's whimsical madmen. Vladimir is stirred from the torpor of his job and his relationship with Challah, a fleshy redhead who works in an S-and-M sex club, by a pair of chance encounters. The first is with a demented Russian war veteran named Rybakov, who lives in unexplained uptown splendor while drawing Social Security and communicating with a mysterious electric fan. The second is with a young woman named Francesca, who initiates Vladimir into the glamorous world of American academe, introducing him to a circle of pretentious graduate students for whom his Russianness is irresistibly exotic, and to her own parents, university intellectuals who strike the young man as exemplars of all that is tolerant, worldly and attractive in his new homeland

A. O. Scott is a film critic at The Times.