‘Mad Men’ creator writes a suspenseful novel

Matthew Weiner takes a break from TV success.

One day in the NEW YORK — fall of 2015, Matthew Weiner was wandering a rarefied block on the Upper East Side when he saw a construction worker leering at an adolescent girl in a school uniform “tall and slender

— and a little knock-kneed”

— as she walked into a building under renovation.

“What I really notice,” he says, remembering the event, “is him staring at her in a way that really just makes me sick.” Now he’s tucked into a booth in the velvety bunker of the restaurant at the Carlyle Hotel, near where he witnessed the troubling encounter. “As I was walking around the corner, I just thought, ‘What if her dad saw that?’ ”

That carnal glance inspired “Heather, the Totality,” the first work of fiction published by the man best known for creating the Emmy-winning television sensation “Mad Men.” The slim novel, written from the perspective of multiple characters, is a taut tale of obsession involving an affluent Manhattan couple, their beloved daughter and a disturbed young man.

While the novel’s contemporary timeline and sparse dialogue mark a departure from “Mad Men,” its New York setting and exploration of class, marriage and the perils of success will be familiar to viewers of the drama, which followed 1960s ad man Don Draper.

When Weiner wrapped post-production on the series in December 2014, he followed the advice of friends and spent several months “refilling the tank.” The 52-year-old wore his robe a lot and read, for the first time, Alice Munro and Haruki Murakami. He caught up on TV and re-watched “Angels in America,” a favorite because “there’s just no rules in that thing.”

He even took a break from his long-held habit of jotting down ideas and overheard conversations in a notebook, then gradually tried to start again — a painful process, it turns out. “My ear wasn’t there,” Weiner says. One day, he scrawled a note in frustration: “So much coming in, nothing coming out.”

People kept asking him the same thing: “What’s next?” Even his children (Weiner and his wife, Linda Brettler, have four sons) would pose the question in jest, and Weiner would play along. “Well, I’m probably going to go downstairs and make some coffee,” he’d say.