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A decade on from its publication by the tiny and now-defunct Tyrant Books, Atticus Lish's debut novel still reads like something stumbled upon rather than published. It arrived trailing superlatives from almost every serious outlet and went on to win the PEN/Faulkner, but none of that apparatus quite prepares you for the experience of actually reading it. The book is a love story told at ground level, in a register so flat and unhurried that the violence of what it depicts sneaks up on you.

Zou Lei, a Uighur from north-western China, has arrived in New York without papers and with almost no English. Skinner, twenty-three and on his third honourable discharge from the Iraq War, has landed in a Queens basement apartment with a duffel bag, a handgun and an untreated case of PTSD. They meet in a food court, start running together, and for a few hundred pages the novel rests on the fragile proposition that two broken people might be enough for each other.

Lish's gift, and the thing that separates the book from the wave of post-9/11 literary fiction it briefly belonged to, is his refusal to dress any of this up. The dialogue is unmarked by quotation marks, the paragraphs are dense with the actual texture of outer-borough life - dollar shorts on 103rd Street, Chinese buffet kitchens, weights lifted in unventilated rooms - and the sentences have a terse, propulsive rhythm that owes something to Kerouac and something to military cadence. He has walked these streets; you can feel it on every page. New York here is not the aspirational city of Manhattan fiction but a vast, garish, overlit machine for grinding down the undocumented and the discharged.

The book is not without costs. At 418 pages of small print it is longer than it needs to be, and the accretion of detail that gives the world its density can also feel punishing, a deliberate wearing-down. Certain threads - a book title glimpsed above a mosque door, some of the recurring imagery around running and faith - are set up with care and then never quite developed. A late atrocity committed by Jimmy, the landlady's ex-con son, is rendered in the same flat declarative as everything else, and it is genuinely difficult to read; whether that counts as courage or excess will depend on the reader. The ending is foreshadowed so heavily from the opening chapters that it arrives less as shock than as confirmation.

What lingers, though, is Zou Lei. She is one of the more convincing portraits of an immigrant woman written by an American man in recent fiction - practical, funny, physically formidable, never reduced to symbol or victim. The relationship she builds with Skinner is tender without being sentimental, and the novel's title turns out to be less a promise than a quiet joke about what their life together can realistically become. Angry, compassionate, overlong and unforgettable, this is the sort of first novel that reshapes what you expect a first novel to do.