These days, in certain corners, it’s something akin to a truism that every woman is a warrior, a badass, a queen. It is, for that reason, a profound relief to meet Hazel, the passive, hapless, magnificently abject protagonist of Alissa Nutting’s deranged new comic novel, “Made for Love.” When the book begins, Hazel, who is “technically homeless,” is standing in her seventy-six-year-old father’s trailer, staring at a chipped pine box from which a brand-new sex doll named Diane has just been freed, via can opener, by her father. The box resembles a coffin that a wild animal has crawled out of, Hazel thinks. Even better, she might be able to sleep in it. I loved Hazel immediately, the way I love drunk women who instigate alarmingly personal conversations in bar bathrooms. She is the rare literary heroine in whose company it would be a pleasure to absolutely wreck my life.

As a nine-year-old child, we learn, Hazel had a recurring daydream in which her teacher would walk into the classroom and scream, “ISN’T EVERYTHING HORRIBLE? DOESN’T THE PAIN OF THE WORLD OUTWEIGH THE JOY BY TRILLIONS?” before unleashing an extended rant that includes the inspirational line “WE TOO INHABIT BODIES MADE OF MEAT-WRAPPED BONES.” (“Whenever her mother had asked, Hazel had always told her, School is great.”) Hazel had the kind of parents who, for instance, named their Christmas tree after their dead friend Phyllis and put a steaming meatloaf underneath it instead of presents because meatloaf had been Phyllis’s favorite food. In turn, Hazel was the kind of kid who licked the ketchup off the memorial meatloaf as soon as her parents left the room. Hazel grows up; she fails out of college; she donates plasma for “drug and cheeseburger money.” Typically, she drinks “a few personality beers” to warm up before meeting people. In regard to menstruation, “unless she was bleeding profusely, she took a very laissez-faire position on the whole thing.”

Nutting’s first novel, “Tampa,” featured a very different protagonist: a sociopathic, twenty-six-year-old middle-school teacher named Celeste, who admits, in the book’s second paragraph, that she’s a dedicated pedophile who lusts after fourteen-year-old boys. She carefully grooms her target, a student named Jack, and then engages him in a queasy, compulsive affair. Nutting’s deviant flair for comedy generally involves doubling down on a wildly uncomfortable situation or image, and in “Tampa,” this tactic often overwhelms whatever hard, awful humor is there to be found. Celeste covers her breasts in whipped cream in the opening scene of the novel, hoping that her flesh will absorb the scent of dairy, and fantasizes about chaperoning a junior-high dance and whispering, to some poor soul, “I want to smell you come in your pants.” Celeste ruins Jack’s life swiftly, and she ends up in a beach town, hunting boys who are bored on family trips and planning for the day when she’ll have to move to a city “with runaways hungry for cash.”

At the beginning of “Made for Love,” when Hazel is staring at Diane the sex doll’s pine coffin and thinking that she could sleep in it, we seem to have caught her at a similar point as “Tampa” did Celeste—on a precipice, that is, about to tumble into total self-destruction, doomed by a certain Florida frame of mind. Hazel has just run away from her husband, a billionaire tech C.E.O. named Byron Gogol, who has been trying to implant a microchip in her brain. “Like a file-share thing,” Hazel explains to her father, as he sits on his motorized scooter and cuddles with Diane. “We would meld. The first neural-networked couple in history.” (“Made for Love” is set in 2019, to accommodate advances like sleep-optimization helmets and the “tincture of spaghetti odor” that Byron sniffs while slurping his meal-replacement shakes.)

Byron is probably going to murder her, Hazel muses, with the ruefulness of a person who has just found out that a restaurant is out of guacamole. He has invested a lot of money in her, and running away will deeply inconvenience him. The unlikely pair met after Byron gave a commencement speech at the college that Hazel had formerly been enrolled in: her friend Jenny, a student reporter with the flu, asks Hazel to interview Byron in her place. Byron quickly suggests a six-month relationship contract, and Hazel goes off to live in his residence, “The Hub,” which feels like “where the deceased go to cool down to the afterlife’s new room temperature.” The setup, at the beginning, is not unlike that of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” and Byron eventually frames the mind meld as a romantic gesture; before he asks Hazel if he could microchip her, he drops to one knee.

Hazel’s father, meanwhile, truly loves Diane the sex doll, whose drawn-on smile can be replaced by a handy opening that resembles a “baboon’s ass.” He treats Diane tenderly and respectfully, buries his head in her hair. She offers advantages over human women. “Every date I went on . . . I’m thinking, ‘This lady is too nice for me to die on top of,’ ” he says. “But Diane here . . . I can die on Diane all I want.” Another character, a con man named Jasper who literally screws women out of their fortunes, by engaging them in thrilling romantic relationships and then asking to borrow large sums of money, wishes that sex with his targets would “feel more like work, like what he did was closer to prostitution than to fraud. But the sex with them was effortless; he never had to fake arousal. He liked to consider himself a feminist in this way.” After all, feminists are “all about body acceptance, and he had always accepted every body.”

Nutting gets enormous mileage out of the labyrinthine ways in which her characters redirect their romantic impulses. And she has a knack for placing moments of tender horror where straightforward affection might otherwise live. Hazel recalls meeting Byron: “His haircut creeped her out the way freshly hedged lawns sometimes did, making her feel like life was already over and she’d arrived on the planet too late.” When Byron holds her after sex, it is “more an immobilization than an embrace, like a parent putting his arms around a child before a vaccination shot to ensure stillness.” At her first taste of freedom, going for a solo drink at a filthy bar called the Spotted Rose, Hazel experiences an intense wave of gratitude, which she mistakes for “a diarrheal precursor.” At the bar, she meets a man named Liver who works as a part-time gravesitter; when they eventually have sex, Hazel likens her experience to that of a mechanic rolling around under a truck. When they snuggle afterward, it feels like “two hard-boiled eggs rubbing up against each other as they pickled together in a jar.”

Somehow, Nutting is able to use this register of exhilarated lovelessness to extract affection from the reader in great quantities. “Made for Love,” more than any other novel I’ve read lately, exudes valiant charm. You root for Hazel the way you do for Laura Dern’s sealant-huffing character in Alexander Payne’s 1996 comedy “Citizen Ruth,” or for a scrappy stray dog. And as is true for many stray dogs, things do get quite dark for Hazel. In one incredible scene, she drunkenly crawls on her hands and knees through the trailer park where her father lives, sprays a hose directly at her face for hydration purposes, then tackles a plastic flamingo, which she hoists over her shoulders like a crucifix and tucks fondly into bed. Another day, she gets her arm stuck in Diane’s usable mouth, and screams for mercy “as though the doll were a hairless, giant-breasted attack dog.” Close to the end of the book, a woman named Ms. Cheese tells Hazel, “I hope you win your soul back in a bet or something.” There is no redemptive thesis in “Made for Love” whatsoever: when Hazel begins to gradually emerge from her chrysalis of pathos and male entrapment, she’s much the worse for what she’s gone through. Even so, the book is a total joyride, dizzying and surprising, like a state-fair roller coaster that makes you queasy for a moment but leaves you euphoric in the end.