There’s been a surfeit of wounded warriors in recent American fiction, and his arrival worried me; these men can, in lesser hands, be stock characters. Not here. The encrusted detail in Mr. Lish’s prose flicks the switch on in every sentence. Here is Skinner approaching his new apartment for the first time:

“One of the houses had its postage-stamp yard filled with statues and figurines — of elves, wise men, the crucifixion, leprechauns, animals, plastic flowers, a sleigh, a whirligig that spun in the wind. There were wind chimes on the porch and an American flag bumper sticker for 9/11 on the house. This was where he was going.”

Image Atticus Lish Credit... Shelton Walsmith

Skinner and Zou Lei — he calls her Zooey — don’t meet cute. He bumps into her while looking for an erotic massage. They bond in part over their shared love of working out, intense sessions that are like purification rituals, sessions that are almost the only thing that makes sense to them. They become one more unlikely couple in Flushing, “going home to open a Styrofoam shell in the dark, eat something hot together.”

Skinner is a decent man who does bad things. He doesn’t trust himself. He sometimes treats Zou Lei badly. This is a love story with a lot of ache in it. He tells her to shut up and, Mr. Lish writes, “this pulled the power cord right out of her.” She accuses him of thinking she is “some garbage person,” just another piece of unwanted human biology.

Mr. Lish has taught English in Central Asia, and he works as a Chinese-English translator of technical material. He’s a former Marine who, according to his biography, has held a long series of blue-collar jobs.

I don’t doubt his résumé: This book is thick with the kind of sub-countertop-level detail that can’t be faked. He also arrives with a literary pedigree. His father is Gordon Lish, the writer and influential editor, most famously of Raymond Carver.

Atticus Lish has written a necessary novel, one with echoes of early Ken Kesey, of William T. Vollmann’s best writing and of Thom Jones’s pulverizing short stories.

His writing about Queens is superb. The graffiti-covered steel gates on businesses at night “resembled a thousand tattooed eyelids.” Flushing is where you see a hard glint in people’s eyes, “the knowing look of someone who wasn’t going to be fooled again.”