IT IS JUST AFTER NOON, but Michael Chabon, the thirty-eight-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, is still working on his first coffee of the day. He sits in kitchen of the ninety-four-year-old house with a white picket fence, a quiet, tree-lined street in Berkeley, California, where he lives with his wife, mystery novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their three children. He's wearing khaki shorts, a Hawaiian shirt (tropical flowers, hula girls, labeled isles) and a striped string bracelet. Hair: unkempt, shoulder-length, dark, just beginning to streak gray. Glasses: small, oval. Eyes: intense, blue, with the tendency to dart. His voice is gentle, a tad nasal; his words are carefully enunciated.

Waldman is very pregnant. (She will deliver their third child three days later.) She's wearing a tight Swiss Army Knife T-shirt, has red hair and freckles. A mold of her pregnant torso sits out on a table. She joins us for lunch.

Chabon typically sleeps late because he works at night -- starting write around midnight, finishing at four or so. Last night, he finished the second draft of the screenplay adaptation of his most recent novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which won the Pulitzer Prize in April 2000.

The title characters of that book -- Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay -- are Jewish cousins living in New York in the 1940s who create a Houdini-like comic-book superhero, the Escapist. (They were inspired, in part, by Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, the creators of Superman.) Both Kavalier and Clay are attempting to transcend -- to escape -- real-life complications through the splashy pages of their comic book. Joe, the artist, left his parents and brother behind in Nazi-occupied Prague. Sammy, the writer, is a Brooklyn kid trying to deal with his closeted homosexuality as well as a long-absent father. It is a muscular and ambitious novel, paced and plotted like the very pulp tales it celebrates, but also working up headier metaphorical weight. Perhaps most appealing of all are the endless period details; as in, say, E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, the book is steeped in history, featuring cameos by Orson Welles and Salvador Dali along with excited, obsessive riffs on stage magic, Jewish mysticism, Antarctic exploration and the Empire State Building.

Chabon grew up in suburban Maryland. His parents divorced when he was young, but he otherwise had a stable childhood. He made an auspicious literary debut at the age of twenty-four, with The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, a funny, wise and highly praised coming-of-age novel that made its author a Hot Young Thing. In the book, the main character explores, among other things, various sides of his sexuality, and thus many readers assumed Chabon was gay. (He is not, but says he didn't mind.) After Pittsburgh, Chabon labored for several years on an epic second novel titled Fountain City. It eventually swelled to 1,000 pages, but he never quite pulled it together and eventually set it aside. He feared becoming a has-been by his late twenties, a one-hit wonder. Instead, he churned this deflating experience into Wonder Boys, a hilarious sendup and paean to the writer's life in which the main character, Grady Tripp (played by Michael Douglas in last year's film adaptation), a burned-out older author, wrestles with his own failed magnum opus.

With Kavalier and Clay, the Michael Chabon epic that succeeded, Chabon says golems were the key. A golem -- an enormous, Frankensteinian clay creature from Jewish mythology that is brought to life by a rabbi -- figures in the virtuoso opening chapters of Kavalier and Clay, which detail Joe's escape from Prague with the help of an aging illusionist. The breakthrough came while Chabon was researching comics and interviewed Will Eisner, the creator of the classic newspaper strip The Spirit. Eisner brought up golems without prompting, mentioning how most of the golden-age comic-book creators were Jewish, how Superman is very golemlike, how there is something inherently Jewish about many superheroes. This jelled the story in Chabon's mind, made things start to pop. "That's when I first realized," he says, "I was onto something more than comic books."

Where were you when you heard you won the Pulitzer?

An Associated Press reporter called and talked to Ayelet. He barely got out the sentence before she started screaming. I was out back in my office and I heard this horrible noise. I didn't know it was her. I came out and thought somebody in the neighborhood was screaming at the top of their lungs. Then I realized it was coming from inside my house.

How did you guys celebrate?

We got takeout Chinese. That's our extreme, exciting life. [Pauses] First, we shot up.

The character Grady Tripp in Wonder Boys was based on your own experience trying to unite an epic novel. Did you think of Kavalier and Clay as finally achieving that novel?

Not exactly, but definitely, once I realized what I was in for with Kavalier and Clay -- that it was going to be this big, giant book -- I did feel some apprehension looking back on the whole experience of Fountain City, the novel I tried to write between Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys. But the thing about this book, I felt from the very beginning that it was about something, and that it was often about a lot of things. And the things it was about were all connecting: comics, stage magic, golems, all that stuff. And that just never happened with that other book.

But was it your interest in comic books that first drew you into the story?

No, it was really an interest in New York from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. Which really coincided with the time my dad was living in New York. He was born in Brooklyn, and he moved to Washington, D.C., as a teenager in the Fifties, so this period of my dad's Brooklyn childhood had always been this magical, mythical thing to me. And comic books were always a part of my understanding the world of my dad's childhood. When I was a kid in the Seventies, DC Comics was reprinting a lot of the golden-age material, so I actually got to read a lot of the same comic books my dad did. And it fit naturally into my work because I've written a lot about the idea of collaboration between men.

What is it about relationships between men that appeals to you?

You know, I don't really know. I think writers tend to write about the same thing over and over and over again, variations on a theme, and that seems to be one of my themes. I almost don't want to look into it too carefully because it seems like this pot of stuff I can always dip my ladle into, and I don't really want to start checking the recipe.

Did you have a strong partner relationship with another guy?

I've always had one best friend and no other friends. So I was always in that kind of dyad, or pair relationship, where I was one of two, an island of two. And those friendships were very much collaborations, artistic collaborations of some kind. In one case, it was an actual comic-book company where my friend and I created our own characters. We called ourselves Nova Comics. I also have that kind of relationship with my father. And now, in a way, that relationship in my life is with my son. He's definitely my most frequent male companion. We make comics together. He makes up the characters and I help him draw them.

How old were you and your friend when you created the comic-book company?

I guess I was about ten. It all started -- I'll never forget -- with a walk to the swimming pool in our neighborhood. We had towels tied around our necks like capes. I was this bathing suit, which -- bathing suits of that era were very different from bathing suits nowadays. They were short, trunk kind of suits with nubbly polyester fabric, and they actually had these strappy belts that you would buckle in front, so they really looked like superhero trunks. And mine had this, as I recall, 1973 pattern that was vaguely Aztec-looking, in a horrible orange and pink and black. My friend's were just solid blue, and he had a blue towel. So we were just talking and walking -- I really did draw on this memory in the scene in Kavalier and Clay where Sammy and Joe go out for a walk and come up with The Escapist -and as wa walked to the pool, these two kids with towels around our necks, we became Dark Lord and Aztec, two superheroes. But we were old enough where we didn't want to be them. We weren't little kids anymore. So we decided that we should draw them.

What superpowers did your characters possess?

Dark Lord had a magic sword. He was sort of a knight. He also had a helmet. Aztec was the reincarnation of an Aztec warrior. We were multicultural before our time.

You were like the comic-shop guy on "The Simpsons."

Yes. I was a total geek. And I still am. I'm kind of proud of it now. It caused me a lot of pain as a kid, but the geeks run the world now. I grew up in Columbia, Maryland, and I tried to start this thing called the Columbia Comic Book Club. I placed an ad in the local paper and I rented a room in the community center.

AYELET WALDMAN: Oh, my God!

I made up a newsletter. I typed it laboriously on a typewriter with columns and everything.

AW: Oh, my God, honey!

Two people showed up. With their moms. I thought it would be a roomful of people intellectually discussing the merits of keeping a secret identity. It was so crushing and disappointing. After that, we never met again. I had actually expected to make some money collecting dues. This makes me sound like that kid in Rushmore.

AW: You were that kid.

Yeah. I got better grades, though.

What were your favorite comic books back then?

Well, in those days, you made a very natural progression. You'd start off as a DC reader -- that was Superman, Batman, Legion of Super-Heroes, Wonder Woman, The Flash. They were sort of morally clearer. Uncomplicated. The heroes never had any personal problems. It was more appealing and easier to grasp for a kid who's six, seven, eight, nine. Then, as I got older -- ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen -- I got into Marvel: Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Daredevil. They had more complicated personal lives, they bickered with each other, they couldn't get dates, they were full of angst, their powers were often a burden to them. Which was all much more appealing to an adolescent.

Did you continue reading comics as a teenager?

After sixteen, I stopped completely. I sold my collection. I got into other things, like music. I got my first stereo when I was sixteen, and that totally revolutionized my life. I started buying records. That was where my obsessive need to master an entire body of knowledge went at that point.

You've got your Queen poster proudly displayed in your office.

Queen was really it. I was aware of Queen when "Killer Queen" came out, but that was more an AM-radio thing. I can remember hearing it in the car with my mom. But when "Bohemian Rhapsody" came out -- they were perfect for me at that time because they were just objectionable enough for a thirteen-year-old. They had long hair. There was something funny going on there sexually, although you didn't know quite what to call it. And they were very loud. The songs that were hits on the radio were poppier, but when you put an album on, a lot of it was offensive to parental ears.

AW: You were in a punk band.

They were called the Bats. This was in Pittsburgh. I was with them very briefly. I was the singer, so-called, because I can't play any instrument. I can't sing, either, but that was OK. This was in college. It wasn't a punk band. We didn't have the purity of punk, where we felt like we had to reject everything. It was just a conscious "Let's just play a kind of music we like that's loud."

Were you uniting the lyrics, too?

Yeah. And I think they were kind of lame now, looking back. I was very self-conscious. I probably thought I had a mission or agenda. And I was heavily into this J.G. Ballard influence in fiction at that point, so I know I did weirdly Ballardian lyrics about car accidents and plane crashes.

Any song titles you remember?

Uhh ... [Long pause, sigh] There was one called "Yesterday Does Not Rule." That was kind of lame.

But kind of cool. You also wrote a TV pilot about a garage band.

I wrote a treatment. It would've been a great show. The idea was to do a show about a garage band in Pittsburgh, a comedy-drama, hour-long. It would be a band that had no interest in making it, necessarily, and there would be regular people with crappy jobs who played in this band, and you'd get the whole scene. A band is a family, and so it would've been like most great TV shows, which are about a family that isn't a family -- from Star Trek to something like The West Wing. A group of people that's always together and form this whole new kind of family, but they're not related to each other. And I thought it'd be really cool to use real musicians who could act, or actors who could play, and have them rehearse together, play songs together, so the material they presented on the show would be stuff they'd actually created.

Kind of like "The Partridge Family." Did you mention that in the pitch?

Actually, I did. I said I was updating The Partridge Family. But they said it didn't fit their demographic. It sounded too smart.

What are you listening to now?

I've entered this very, very, very embarrassing regression to Yes and early Seventies prog rock.

Do you want this off the record?

No, you know what? I'm not ashamed. I heard that Genesis song "The Carpet Crawlers" from The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway album, and it sounded really good to me. It sounded very fresh after all these years.

Yeah! You heard it here first. Prog, King Crimson -- it's coming back. As far as current bands, I like the Magnetic Fields, Belle and Sebastian, Aimee Mann. I'm always drawn to singers like Aimee Mann who are sort of neglected geniuses. Alex Chilton. Or people who somehow completely lose it, like Brian Wilson.

Do you listen to music while you write?

Increasingly I do, yeah. I never used to, never. But now I have my computer hooked up to speakers and a turntable, and I've also been listening to a lot of MP3s. A lot of that Seventies prog rock tends to fade into the background, so I'm not really hearing it while I'm working. And in the case of Yes, the lyrics don't really have any meaning at all, so you don't need to listen to them. It's just sound, but it's propulsive.

Were you listening to anything specifically while writing Kavalier and Clay?

A lot of big-band swing. Artie Shaw. Benny Goodman. It was very evocative for me. "Begin the Beguine" or "In the Mood" really worked for me. Duke Ellington.

Have there been offers to actually make The Escapist into a comic?

A couple, but nothing serious enough. Comic-book companies have asked me to write for other titles. I would love to, if I had the time. But I know myself. I know I'd get way too into it and I'd give it way more time than it would actually merit.

If you could work on any comic book, which would it be?

There's this really great obscure DC character from the Forties called Mr. Terrific. He has no powers. He's just really good at a lot of things. He can fence, he can play chess, he's a polymath. That's his power -- he's very gifted. And he wears this really silly costume with a red hood and a green top, and on his chest, instead of a symbol, are the words FAIR PLAY. His origin story is that he was so good at everything that life had no savor for him any longer and he had mastered all fields of human endeavor. Then he sees someone being mugged or something and saves them, and that's his thrill. "I've finally found something - fighting crime!" Oh, he's fabulously wealthy, too. A playboy.

It's worth reviving.

Yeah, I'd love to do it, but I don't think I have the time.

Your first novel came out when you were twenty-four. What drove you to achieve at such a young age?

Well, I think I'm driven to do a lot of things, but I was never driven to get my first novel published at twenty-four. I didn't have anything to do with it. I just wrote it for my thesis at an MFA program. That's all I was driven to do, was get my degree. But I had a professor there who took my manuscript and sent it to his agent without telling me, and she took me on and sold the book. So I never said, "This book's done, I'm ready." All I asked him was, "Do you think this is going to be an acceptable thesis?"

How was it being a wonder boy?

Well, the upside was that I was published and I got a readership. That was great. If there was a downside, it was that, emotionally, this stuff started happening and I was still like, "Wait a minute, is my thesis done yet?" It took me a few years to catch up. And I was married at the time to someone else who was also a struggling writer, and the success created a gross imbalance in our careers, which was problematic. It's really special to have a book published at that age and get that much attention. It wasn't that I didn't enjoy it, but I took it for granted in a way, because I had nothing to compare it to.

You turned down an offer from "People" magazine to name you one of their Fifty Most Beautiful People of the year. Did you even consider it?

No. Not for a second.

Did you find it flattering? No.

AW: I find it flattering.

I don't give a shit. That's the truth. It's so --

Was it a big confidence booster?

No. I only take pride in things I've actually done myself. To be praised for something like that is just weird. It just felt like somebody calling and saying, "We want to put you in a magazine because the weather's so nice where you live." I don't have anything to do with that.

Is that when the rumors about you being gay started?

Yeah. It was just because the book is so ... I mean, it wasn't really ever mysterious that people thought that.

Did anything about your reaction to the rumors surprise you?

No. I had expected it. I didn't expect it would be in Newsweek magazine.

AW: But it's not like you minded.

No, on the contrary. I had a strong gay readership for The Mysteries of Pittsburgh who recommended it to their friends, and I was really grateful. I don't think the book would have done as well without that. My core readership is still people who found me with that book, and a lot of those readers are gay. What I felt like I was trying to do in that book was not close any doors. So that where that character ends up, you don't know if he's gay or straight or bi, and I don't think he knows, either. That's where I wanted to leave him. And I think that over the years, from e-mails or letters or conversations with people who've read The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, that's the thing about the book that people like most. They often read it at moments where they were wrestling with things and trying to fit themselves into the boxes you're supposed to fit yourself into, and they were having a hard time doing that, and they took comfort in a story about someone who gives up on trying to force himself to do that.

So do you feel compelled to put gay characters in every book now?

Well, I can rely on that kind of super-literary identification between the reader and the writer that goes around the book, in a sense, where readers try to form a connection with the author, who is trying to hide behind the work in a way. And I can begin to play with that a little bit. My role model in doing things like that is Prince. The way he very consciously teases you. There's that song where he says, "I can't believe what people say. Am I black or white? Am I straight or gay?" His attitude toward that is: I'm not going to tell you. Keep talking, keep asking questions, that's good. But I'm just going to keep teasing you.

Have you thought about why you're drawn to writing about gay characters?

Yeah, I've thought about it a lot. I'm interested in questions of identity and sexuality and how things like that get determined and defined. And I'm interested especially in relationships between straight men and gay men, because I think there are a lot of friendships like that out there where one best friend is gay and one is straight, but those friendships I don't think get written about much, or depicted or portrayed in movies or television. I've had a lot of them in my life. We were talking earlier about the boxes you get put in, and how people are so much more complicated. And I think a lot of life is lived in between the boxes or outside of the boxes, but there are no words or labels or designations for those spaces. And that, to me, is great material for fiction.

Did you ever go through a period of youthful rebellion?

I was old when I did it.

Was it a year or two ago?

It was last week. No, I was a really good kid all through high school. I got into almost no trouble. I didn't drink or do drugs at all. The summer right after high school I got into a little bit of trouble, just fooling around. I got caught in the act, with two friends, of being about to vandalize our school with paint. Our paint was hijacked by a couple of infinitely tougher, meaner kids who had come to drive their truck through the front doors of the school. And when they saw us with our paint, they took it away from us and they vandalized the school themselves. When I got to college, I started smoking, drinking, smoking pot, fooling around. But by then, it wasn't really rebelling because I wasn't at home.

There's this sort of romantic image of writers living on the edge, self-destructive lives. You've got this very stable home life --

But I think that's a competing model that goes back into the history of art. You do have that romantic Baudelaire-Rimbaud-Lord Byron model that's continually being updated and reinvented, going through Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, whatever. But you also have a much more quiet but very present model of the artist as family man. Especially when it comes to novel writing. The novel is a bourgeois art form. It always has been. It was invented to be read by educated, sort of upper-middle-class people from the very beginning, and often it has dealt with the bourgeoisie as its subject matter -- questions of home and family relations. It's often been a very domestic art form. There have been plenty of self-destructive rebel-angel novelists over the years, but writing is about getting your work done and getting your work done every day. If you want to write novels, they take a long time, and they're big, and they have a lot of words in them.

Which is harder to manage when you're hung over.

Yeah. And the best environment, at least for me, is a very stable, structured kind of life. I have to get my thousand words every day. But also, that's my background. I grew up in the suburbs, very middle-class. That's what I am, where I come from, what I'm comfortable being.

PHOTO (COLOR): Michael Carbon

PHOTO (COLOR): Genius in the making: Chabon at eight

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By Mark Binelli

Photographed By Bryce Duffy