Writer Jonathan Lethem has published his latest book, titled Chronic City. (Doubleday Books)

Jonathan Lethem hearts New York. This is no secret to readers who've encountered the author's acclaimed previous works, including Motherless Brooklyn (1999) and the masterful The Fortress of Solitude (2003). But it might take a little longer for those encountering his sprawling new novel, Chronic City, to catch on.

Set in a Manhattan at once recognizable and eerily sci-fi, Chronic City features a Michael Bloomberg-type mayor, bedraggled funds managers and plenty of chi-chi Upper East Side dinner parties. There's also snow in summertime, a perpetual grey fog — as well as a chocolate smell — hanging over the downtown and a giant tiger crushing pavement and rent-controlled buildings by night. Parsing what it all means can sometimes feel as exhilarating and exhausting as New York itself, the city that never sleeps.

Lethem says the inherent strangeness of the real Manhattan helped inform the novel's often-otherworldly tone.

"If I can speak for growing up in Brooklyn, I always had a kind of double relationship to [Manhattan]," he said in a recent interview. "I mean, in one regard, it's your city — you can go there, you can get on the subway and have a slice of pizza and wander around Greenwich Village. So it belongs to you.

"But Manhattan also retains, from the distance of Brooklyn, some of what it holds for the whole world, which is that it's a sort of symbolic, unattainable place of desire and possibility. And also a centre of power and manipulation and media. And so, you do have this sort of projected quality, too, even though it's right there. It's very real and very unreal."

Using this duality as his jumping-off point, Lethem creates an epic, chaotic story, filled with red herrings and jazzy pop-culture riffs and digressions, where nothing is what it appears to be.

In spite of Chronic City's more surrealistic flourishes, Lethem is more interested in charting the madcap exploits of his characters. At its core, Chronic City is a study of friendship, focusing on a band of misfits that includes Oona Laszlo, a smart-mouthed ghostwriter; Richard Abneg, a one-time lefty radical who now works for the mayor; and Chase Insteadman, a former TV actor coasting on his charm and residual cheques.

They all orbit Perkus Tooth, a once-notorious Rolling Stone writer and full-blown eccentric who unites his disciples for long nights of dope-smoking, greasy cheeseburgers and obsessive discussions about everything from The Twilight Zone episodes to The New Yorker magazine's "controlling" fonts.

(Doubleday Books)

"I've been wanting to write about people hanging out, the texture of time going by in the kind of non-grammatic way that people make their life out of friendships and groups of people," Lethem said, explaining the considerable amount of Chronic City that takes place inside Tooth's vividly rendered den of slackerdom.

"It's almost like a situation comedy, you know, with a very dark backdrop. The city behind it is this very sombre portrayal, but in the foreground, it's almost like Seinfeld. Just like the people who get together and have inane problems, and it's like reset. Every time they get together it's a new stupid problem, and that's what certain kinds of friendships can be like."

Lethem's Seinfeld reference feels particularly apt, because a lot of the characters' activities initially revolve around nothing. In one of the novel's funniest and most elaborate set-pieces, the author devotes 30 pages to one debauched night, where the characters bond, bicker and dance to tracks from the Rolling Stones album Some Girls, all while making futile attempts to win a mysterious, hypnotic vase that's for sale on eBay.

But just when Chronic City looks like it could float away in the haze of its own dope smoke, Tooth delivers a dizzying, impassioned rant that feels like a rallying cry on behalf of post-millennial New York, which Tooth insists is a now a "replica of itself." Lethem says he conceived the book in 2004, shortly after the Bush administration was re-elected. Later, he adds: "I'm as angry as Perkus is, and this force of trying to express the inexpressible wrongness of what we've been handed is what the book is all about."

How readers respond to Chronic City will undoubtedly depend on how they view Tooth, with his grotesque wandering eye and his conspiracy theories about everything from Rudolph Giuliani's Disneyfication of 42nd Street to Norman Mailer's career. Though Lethem laughs about reviewers who find Perkus crazy and repulsive, he admits that the character is partly modeled on his own friend and early mentor, the music writer Paul Nelson.

In the end, it is Tooth's idol, Marlon Brando, who seems to best embody Chronic City's spirit and overarching themes. "This is a book about acting, partly. It's about the fact that maybe more of us are acting than we know, or reading from a script than we would like to believe. And Brando is just this consummate image of someone who kind of refused the script — at great cost, and the price not only of a dissident position, but an absurd and often obnoxious person in the world."

When asked if the ambitious, unruly Chronic City is his own form of refusal or provocation, Lethem replied with characteristic humility.

"Impossible art gestures, reaching to enunciate outrageous or impossible things that will shake people and make them wake up — that is very, very important to me. I'm very eager to try to get there. I mean, I would be honoured if this book struck you as having gotten there."

Chronic City is in stores now.

Lee Ferguson writes about the arts for CBC News.