It is tempting to say that Gary Shteyngart’s sophomore novel, “Absurdistan” (Random House, 333 pages, $24.95), is the second in what one hopes will be a string of sophomoric novels, for Mr. Shteyngart’s humor is almost that: cheeky, presumptuous, boastful, hyper-sexual. But if sophomoric humor is humor that believes it has come first, is original, and is blessed with newfound collegiate wisdom, then Mr. Shteyngart is anything but.

Not only does he make frequent reference to his influences – Evelyn Waugh, Nikolai Gogol, and Joseph Heller, among others – his sensibility is founded in cultural inferiority and ignorance. He roasts his humor in its own johnny-comelateliness. “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook,” Mr. Shteyngart’s wildly successful first novel, played on the insecurities of a first-generation Russian American who was trying to make it among the hipsters of downtown New York. The 2002 novel was set in 1993, and all the graduate students at City College loved Vladimir Girshkin; they imagined him to be a soulful Russian Jew. In fact he was a bewildered mama’s boy, but he had the horse sense to know his $50 Mexican-wedding shirt was overpriced.

Although the novel was ostensibly a tour de force of Russian-American flavor, it read like a straight New York novel, a downtown survey a la McInerney. The Russian element was simply a handy lens through which to view the mixed-up 1990s. After all, weren’t the artists and college students of that day obsessed with Slavic Prague, “the SoHo of Eastern Europe, the Paris of the 90s,” as Mr. Shteyngart’s characters called it? The young Russian-American author seemed to have put his finger on something deeper than the Russian-American experience.

Mr. Shteyngart’s new novel makes plenty of references to New York, but it has nothing of the previous novel’s sense of place. “Absurdistan” begins in St. Petersburg, where Misha Vainberg is trapped, denied an American visa by INS officials who resent the fact that his mafioso father assassinated an Oklahoma businessman. Misha has been to college in America, and, like Vladimir Girshkin, he is a little soft compared with his parents’ generation. “Everyone knows you’re a sophisticate and a melancholic,” one of his father’s business connections says.

Misha is fat and gluttonous – after his father is killed, for example, Misha’s manservant, Timofey, packs “a leather pouch in which was interred a pair of pork-and-chicken roulettes from the famed Yeliseyev food shop, a bottle of Ativan, and a slug of Johnnie Walker Black, all in case I felt faint and started to teeter over.” This grab bag sums up Misha’s personality: He makes necessities of his luxuries, and though his sense of entitlement generally dilutes his character, occasionally he is scared into unstable bravery, like a drunk.

In a bid to improve his chances with the INS, Misha leaves St. Petersburg for Absurdistan, “The Norway of the Caspian,” a supposedly oil rich statelet where he can buy a Belgian passport. He quickly becomes tangled up in a farce reminiscent of Waugh’s “Scoop.” An ethnic civil war breaks out, and Misha becomes a weird mix of hero and, like his father, inside operator. He eventually discovers that Halliburton – which wanted to create a crisis that would require American military intervention and hence bring in contracts – engineered the civil war.

‘Think Bosnia’ became everyone’s motto. ‘How can we make this place more like Bosnia?’ I mean, you’ve got to hand it to Halliburton. If Joseph Heller were still alive, they’d probably ask him to be on their board.

This Wildean setup – life imitates art – has its moments, but it’s scant payoff for 200 pages of Embassy Row shenanigans. Mr. Shteyngart’s humor proves to be nearly universal, even taking on tanks: “A passing T-62 had begun to rotate its barrel our way, like a slow child trying to make friends.” But whereas “Russian Debutante” gave that humor a rich substrate in the streets of New York – a mise-en-scene appropriate to a novel – this novel is about something slightly less interesting, the news.The old canard about literature ripped from the headlines is true: It feels a little dated even as it hits the presses. And the fact that this novel ends on September 10, 2001, doesn’t help.

There are important technical differences, too, between “Absurdistan” and its more cogent, entertaining predecessor. Misha narrates in the first person, thinking, we assume, in translated Russian; Vladimir is described by a third-person English-language narrator doing a studied Russian-dialect routine. The difference in humor between the two is palpable. Also, Misha’s character relies too much on being fat, whereas Vladimir was a more dynamic composite of goatee, voice, and changing wardrobes.

“Absurdistan” is a fine, humorous book; the problem is that it doesn’t showcase Mr. Shteyngart’s most immediate talents, of which it is a lesser variation.

blytal@nysun.com