raining his third glass of horseradish vodka, Gary Shteyngart is starting to feel chummy. Sliding over on the curved banquette, the young novelist asks to show me some photographs -- snapshots, he says, of a recent trip he took in the ''disaster that is my homeland, the former Soviet Union.''

Shteyngart hands over the first picture: a poorly composed shot of a nondescript urban plaza. ''Oh, this is a great one!'' he says. ''This is Tbilisi, Georgia. One night, I was chased down this street right here by a man with a knife!'' He smiles wistfully. ''The guy had just lost it somehow; he was crazy with despair. You see it all the time there. I went back the next day to memorialize the event.'' He flips to a photo of several hirsute men sitting around a banquet table. Shteyngart, who is in this picture, fits right in: his jet-black goatee is so dense and bristly that you could shine your shoes with it. ''I spent a long weekend outside Tbilisi,'' he explains, ''with some guys who were trying to . . . recruit me.'' In the snapshot, a grinning Shteyngart is holding up an enormous ram's horn. ''It was a ceremonial toast,'' he says. ''They were excited, I think, because they thought they'd succeeded in getting a clever Jew from New York to help them with a scheme.'' The plot, he adds cryptically, ''had to do with American charities.'' (He declined to participate.) So are these acquaintances mafiya? ''Let me put it this way,'' he says wryly. ''This 24-year-old here is practically the only guy in the country with a Porsche.''

Shteyngart is sitting with me in the back booth at the Russian Samovar, a Midtown Manhattan restaurant that serves blini and caviar to nostalgic immigrants. Tonight he is just another anonymous regular. But soon this community will discover that this small, scurrilous-looking 29-year-old has been spying on them -- and their relatives back home -- with a merciless, mischievous eye.

Shteyngart's first novel, ''The Russian Debutante's Handbook,'' is a rambunctious satire that upends one of the most solemn traditions in American literature: the immigrant novel. The hopeful toilers of ''My Antonia'' and ''Call It Sleep'' have been replaced by Vladimir Girshkin, an embittered ''beta immigrant'' who lacks the drive to assimilate into 1990's New York. (His upwardly striving ''alpha immigrant'' parents, who have vaulted to suburban success, can't fathom his failure.) Sick of being ''a man who couldn't measure up to the natives,'' Girshkin turns on America like a spurned lover. He hops on a plane to Eastern Europe -- where, under the auspices of Russian gangsters, he sets up a Ponzi scheme whose victims are rich ''idiot Americans'' looking for a quick post-Communist buck.

In his novel, Shteyngart revels in detailing the debased behavior of his fictional co-nationals. The cast of seedy ex-Soviets includes everyone from Kalashnikov-toting casino managers to Pushkin-quoting prostitutes. And as his strange photo display is making clear, it is a world he knows with surprising intimacy (and one he revisits frequently for fresh material).

He picks up a snapshot of a beach -- ordinary looking except for the oil rig in the distance. ''This is Baku,'' he says. ''Last year on the promenade here, I was sitting on a bench, taking a break from finishing my novel. A woman approached, offering herself for $5. When I said no, she offered to include her 5-year-old daughter.''

Such encounters ''can be hugely depressing,'' he admits. Yet he adds that it is his duty to capture the aching desperation of modern Russian life, whether in Brighton Beach or in Moscow. ''The past 100 years have been just horrific for Russians,'' he says. ''They're history's losers. Their country has become a third-world cesspool. Yet the Russian people have to survive somehow. I'm not excusing criminality, especially not violence, but I do try to understand it.''

Shteyngart turns to a photo of the apartment in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) where his family lived until 1978, when Gary was 6. (His parents were not religious, but they seized the opportunity anyway when Brezhnev began allowing Jews to emigrate.) A large statue of Lenin towers out front. His former home, he reveals with disgust, has become an ''all-Mafiya building, with one Mercedes after another out front.''

Finally, he flips to a picture of a tragic-looking St. Petersburg bar. Two gentle-faced friends, looking plastered, stare woozily into the lens. ''These guys, they're brilliant, they're wonderful people, but they're stuck,'' he says, his lightly accented voice charged with emotion. ''Everyone in Russia is depressed, but instead of the DSM-IV, they have vodka. If Vladimir Girshkin is a beta immigrant, these guys are deltas. They'll never get out.'' He is silent for a moment. ''If not for my parents, this would've been me.''

ary Shteyngart may be the only Soviet emigre in history who had no desire to leave. ''It sounds weird, but I loved my Soviet childhood,'' he says. ''The Communist life suited me just great. I loved the Red Army and everything. It only became horrible once you were an adult.'' A frail child with a Proustian case of asthma, Shteyngart spent much of his youth idling inside his family's Stalin-era apartment, dictating stories to his adoring grandmother. ''I used to play with clothespins, imagining they were Soviet planes,'' he recalls. ''I was so happy.'' Indeed, in Shteyngart's novel, Girshkin's recollections of his own family's Leningrad apartment are the book's most tender, evoking Nabokov's lyrical account of hiding behind the family sofa in ''Speak, Memory.''

Just as Nabokov never got over the agony of exile, Shteyngart has never been able to embrace fully his identity as an American. He describes himself as a ''global writer'' who is, first and foremost, a Russian. His resistance to the U.S.A. started early. Whereas his go-get-'em parents were thrilled to start a new life in Queens -- after a few menial jobs, his father, Semyon, became a mechanical engineer; his mother, Nina, a fiscal manager -- Gary was miserable.

Shteyngart shudders when recalling the local Hebrew school he attended. ''Oh, it was a barbarous place,'' he intones operatically. ''Everyone was so mean. It was my Year Zero.'' Not only did he not speak English, but his classmates also ridiculed him. ''The big problem was that I only had three shirts,'' he says, ''and unfortunately, they looked exactly alike. In the Soviet Union, you could get away with that, but not here.'' Gary's Siberia-worthy overcoat, a woolen monstrosity, was so derided that his teacher called his mother, insisting she throw it out.

Although he remained ''virtually friendless,'' Shteyngart played the role of upstart immigrant well enough. His high test scores got him accepted at Stuyvesant, one of the city's top public high schools. He announced to his parents his plans to become a ruthless multimillionaire. ''The only TV show my family and I watched was 'Dallas,''' he says. ''I'd tell them I wanted to be like J.R.''