With very few exceptions (“Netherland,” “The Kite Runner”), the peculiar genre that — for lack of a better term — is the 9/11 novel has yet to catch on. Go figure. Still, debut novelist H.M Naqvi sets his coming-of-age tale in New York City, immediately pre- and post-9/11. Perhaps he felt his twist was compelling: His protagonists are Pakistani immigrants, young men who identify more with American pop culture than Islamic doctrine. They drink, smoke and hook up, and the narrative meanders along quite aimlessly, the way young men often do, until the boys are arrested, suspected, wrongly, of terrorism.

Navqi’s novel is alternately compelling and ridiculous, beautifully written and overwrought. The latter problem doesn’t seem to be linguistic — Navqi is a graduate of Georgetown and has taught creative writing at Boston University. More likely, dialogue just isn’t his strength. Young people do not speak the way Navqi imagines: “Hiya.” “What’s the lowdown, sis?” “My old man’s a tough nut, huh, doc?” Throwaway sentences become abusive thickets: “The etymology of my ostensibly all-American sobriquet had been informed by my mythical appetite for mother’s milk.” No less than four times does the phrase “produce progeny” instead of “have children” appear.

We are meant to believe that these young men — Chuck, our narrator and a finance guy-turned-cabbie; AC, a debauched academic with distressingly antiquated pop-cultural references; and Jimbo, a personality-free DJ — move in a specific sub-nexus of nighttime glamour. But Navqi’s descriptions of bars and nightclubs and house parties — those great anthropological freakshows — are as generic as a pair of khakis from the Gap. Here’s his description of downtown New York in the immediate aftermath: “Not only were the trains still running irregularly, but the detour through 34th Street had taken longer than usual. Chambers Street was rubble.” The lack of detail implies not so much understatement as unfamiliarity. Also, laziness.

And then, Navqi will surprise. The sequence in which Chuck finds himself under arrest, tossed in solitary with no idea when or if he’ll get out, is restrained and terrifying. “You might hold your head in your hands, pound your fists, sob like a baby, but the floor will remain wet, the toilet backed up, and your cell will continue to stink like a chicken run.” (That said, Navqi’s realism goes only so far — this isn’t “Oz” or “The Wire.”) He deftly brings the reader into this immigrant culture, in which these young men so very much want to be American and feel that they are, until they are so cruelly reminded that they are not. They are lost, emotionally toggling between Karachi and New York City, and that’s compelling, to a point. But Navqi’s characters, ostensible hip-hop freaks and scenesters, are too arch and remote; his New York too bland, even in its moment of bloody disrepair.

Navqi’s epilogue is really the book’s prologue, Chuck recalling his first time flying into the city: 1010 WINS, the Empire State Building, the Hudson. Fittingly, it’s the exact same New York on the way out of this novel as on the way in.

Home Boy

By H.M. Naqvi

Crown