The idea hit him right in the kishkes

BERKELEY — With his combination of literary seriousness (long, heavily researched novels), fruitful relationship to ethnic identity (Jewish) and ability to mine pop genres (science fiction, comic books), Berkeley resident Michael Chabon may have the highest capital of any West Coast writer.

Today Harper Collins releases "The Yiddish Policemen's Union," a detective story, sort of, set in an alternate universe, kind of, where the Jews have been resettled to Alaska. It's also Chabon's first full-length novel for adults since "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," which won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

He may be the only novelist in history to write for both the New York Review of Books -- where he recently had a ravishing essay on Cormac McCarthy and apocalypse fiction -- and Details (where his latest contribution concerned "the man purse").

Throw in leonine good looks that he often finds embarrassing and he can seem like the Prom King of American letters.

So it's refreshing to see that Chabon, he of the sharp cheekbones and shimmering sentences, doesn't spend all his time walking on water.

After dinner on a cool, clear recent night at his brown shingle house, Chabon sat at the kitchen table talking about his novel's origins while his wife, Ayelet Waldman, also a writer and as playfully brassy as her husband is earnestly soft-spoken, was washing dishes.

Suddenly, screams from upstairs. One of his four kids has locked himself in the bathroom. "Put your iPod on!" Chabon yelled to his daughter, who seemed to be somehow involved. Loud crash. Chabon, who is built like a ballet dancer, with long limbs and a thick chest, took off upstairs.

"Welcome to my life!" Waldman yelled.

Chabon, 43, first made waves in 1998 with the sexually ambiguous coming-of-age story "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh," written for his UC Irvine MFA. After the low-key novel "Wonder Boys" (written while he lived in L.A. and later made into a film) and then two story collections, Chabon exploded into the top ranks of contemporary authors with "Kavalier & Clay," the affectionate story of two New York cousins behind the "Golden Age" of comics. The book, with its electric prose, dovetailed with the push for artistic and literary respect for comics of past and present.

The novel that followed, "Summerland," a children's story that merged baseball with mythology, drew mixed reviews but became one of the bestselling kids books ever.