Girls spends so much time and energy on sex–with nubile prostitutes, patronized wives, friends' budding daughters, and so on–that it has to be about something else almost by default. It could, of course, be a novel only about sex. But Nic Kelman's greatest strength is treating sex as more than just sex, even (or especially) when seemingly discussing nothing else. A curious novel that follows a 42-year-old CEO through various bouts with obsolescence, Girls is a meditation on maleness that's both harshly reductive and impressively vast. The rich, globetrotting protagonist is nobody's idea of a decent man, but his selfish swagger hides an introspective mind that seems unsure of the animal actions it at least implicitly commands. Opening on a dalliance with an alarmingly young Korean hooker, Girls follows the man as he cheats on his wife with a cast of women he surveys with eerie detachment. Constant use of the second-person "you" lends the book a faintly accusatory tone, but Girls is anything but a simple morality tale. Instead, the CEO burns a path through bars, strip clubs, and upscale hotels, getting it on with call girls and random pickups who treat sex just as unromantically. The sex parts are daringly explicit, hard and brusque in their attention to brute physicality, but so are the other parts, in which the embattled lothario worries over his attraction to teenage girls and solemnly praises his better half as "the wife you're not sure you don't love." Writing with smoldering calmness, Kelman pitches his character's maneuverings as a sort of protracted existential squirm, focusing on the sexual hunt's alternately exhilarating and exhausting prospects. Dotting his prose with repeated quotes from The Iliad and The Odyssey, and tracing the etymology of words like "cunt," Kelman strives to size up man's march toward glum ugliness. His grandest ambition goes underserved, but his smaller bid for character-building proves almost cruelly engaging, as Girls measures a seemingly negligible difference between instinct and empowerment. The main character's treatment of women is sad and maddening, two grim qualities that haunt him as he asks the wife he both loves and loathes, "Why did you teach me to lie to you?"