The bard of Boerum Hill has turned his attention to the Upper East Side.
After penning the legendary Brooklyn-centric novels “Motherless Brooklyn and “Fortress of Solitude,” Jonathan Lethem set his eighth novel “Chronic City” almost entirely in Manhattan. But the 45-year-old scribe insists the new book — which hit shelves on Tuesday — comes from a Kings County perspective.
“It’s deeply grounded in a Brooklynite’s view of Manhattan,” said Lethem between sips of seltzer in the back room of Building on Bond, a restaurant near his Dean Street home. “It’s a state of being. I wear it as a skin. I don’t have any alternative.”
So it should come as no surprise that Lethem’s Brooklyn-honed prose to cuts through the excesses of the Upper East Side’s soiree society while commemorating the nabe’s few remaining Bohemians.
“Chronic City” tells the story of Chase Insteadman, a faded child star whose astronaut lover is marooned in a space station behind a layer of Chinese mines. Living off of the residuals from his long-canceled sitcom, Chase waits for the unlikely return of his “lostronaut” while navigating the Upper East Side as a mild-mannered, heartbroken neighborhood fixture — until he falls in with a mayoral fixer and a manic cultural critic who subsists only on cheeseburgers, coffee and high-grade marijuana.
It’s a book that Lethem describes as “very satirically open.”
“There is something about Manhattan’s bubble of luxury that is strangely detached from reality,” said Lethem, evoking the iconic New Yorker cover that depicted Manhattan as the center of the world.
Though the setting is new, Lethem — who critics have dubbed a “genre bender” for his style-fusing prose — feels that “Chronic City” is no more of a departure than his previous works.
“I think they are all departures,” he said. “I try to reinvent the work I’m doing so it seems worth doing.
“I’m very proud of this book,” he added. “I’ve put more of what I feel into it. I found a form that merges my interest in realism and surrealism more completely, more naturally, more matter-of-factly than ever before.”
Lethem balanced the real and the imaginary in the comic-tinged “Fortress of Solitude,” but the interplay is both more constant and more casual in “Chronic City,” where characters worry about obscure ceramics and rare Marlon Brando films while remaining consciously aloof of the fact a tiger is ravaging Manhattan and a constant fog has descended on Wall Street.
Harkening back to the Tourette’s-afflicted detective Lionel Essrog, who starred in his breakthrough “Motherless Brooklyn,” Lethem’s “Chronic City” is also inhabited with characters who struggle to communicate.
“I see us all cursed with the fate of knowing or sensing more than we can say,” he said.
Luckily for readers, Lethem doesn’t seem to have that problem himself. In the past 15 years, he has released eight novels, as well as dozens of short stories, pieces of music criticism and essays. He is already at work on his ninth novel, which he revealed — exclusively! — to The Brooklyn Paper, will take place mainly in Queens and Greenwich Village.
That would make three novels in a row starting with “You Don’t Love Me Yet” — his exploration of California’s rock-and-roll scene — that scarcely address Brooklyn.
But that doesn’t mean the Brooklyn native isn’t inspired by his hometown.
“It’s still complicated for me to see how fashionable my old precinct has become. I guess I thrive on that,” said Lethem, who in the past 12 years since his return from a stint in Berkeley has watched new establishments like Building on Bond and Blue Marble Ice Cream replace the bodegas he “commemorated” in “Fortress of Solitude.”
“I get to have it both ways,” he said. “I get to have my suspicions and enjoy my ice cream.”
Jonathan Lethem will read from “Chronic City” at BookCourt [163 Court St. between Pacific and Dean streets in Cobble Hill, (718) 875-3677 on Oct. 20; Greenlight Books [686 Fulton St. at South Portland Avenue in Fort Greene, (718) 246-0200] on Nov. 5; Spoonbill and Sugartown [218 Bedford Ave. at North Fifth Street in Williamsburg, (718) 387-7322] on Nov. 17; and again at BookCourt on Dec. 4.