The New Adventures of Michael Chabon

Image credit: Johanna Norman /The New York Times/Redux Pictures

Chabon breaks off talking about detective fiction when Waldman walks into the kitchen, dressed for the day, hair also wet from the shower. The kids — Sophie, 12; Zeke, 9; Ida-Rose, 5; and Abraham, 4 — are all at school.

''You look really nice,'' Chabon says.

''Oh, no, I don't!'' Waldman replies happily.

''You look really gorgeous!'' Chabon insists.

''I look like, uh, a brick s---house!'' Waldman laughs.

Married 13 years, they are a famous — and famously in love — writing pair, like Nick and Nora Charles with word processors and not so much booze. Waldman, author of 2006's Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, set off a brush fire — and landed on Oprah — after she wrote a 2005 essay in which she admitted she loved her husband more than she loved her children. Chabon, more soft-spoken than Waldman, calls the fallout from the essay ''one of those strange runaway processes that just gets going, and all you can do is hang on and wait for it to be over.''

Nowadays, while the kids are at school, Chabon and Waldman work back-to-back at opposite desks in a backyard writing cottage that smells of Spanish cedar. Last fall he worked so strenuously on his screenplay for the Kavalier & Clay movie that he gave himself carpal tunnel syndrome. (That film, starring Tobey Maguire and Natalie Portman, nearly went into production last Thanksgiving. Now, Chabon says, ''it's stalled, totally stalled.'') His next book will be a young-adult novel; after that, he says, he wants to step away from sword fights and armies and Yiddish detectives. ''This young-adult novel I'm working on now has some fantastic content,'' he says, ''but when I start my next novel for adult readers, I really feel like I'd like to return to reality. I'm eager to take on the present.''

It used to be that Chabon wrote through the night, but working in the daytime now means he gets to see more of the kids, and he gets to read more, too. On the nightstand by his bed you'll find, he says, ''just a big mishmash'' — everything from Isaac Asimov's sci-fi classic Foundation to Jane Austen's Persuasion. It's just another sign that this literary Dr. Frankenstein revels in mixing things up.