Michael Chabon's fans don't seem to care how cold it is; on a more-than-brisk Minnesota night, they jam the spacious back room of St. Paul's Ruminator Books to hear excerpts, and explanations, from his brand-new work. Then they barrage him with improbably-informed questions about the older books they've been following for a decade -- and about a book that never was.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, published earlier this fall to fanfare, is Michael Chabon's third novel, his most ambitious, and his best. It follows two young Jewish cousins and comics creators from the late-thirties birth of the superhero through the Second World War and into the 1950s. Sam Klayman is an adolescent with a gift for storytelling. His cousin Josef Kavalier studied escape artistry (think Houdini) and visual art before he escaped from Nazi-occupied Prague to the cramped Klayman household in Brooklyn. Together they come up with a superhero called the Escapist. Hungry to repeat the successes of Superman, lowbrow New York publishers take the Escapist to delighted readers across America: But can his fictive victories do anything about real wartime evils? And what will Sam and Joe do if adulthood -- and world war -- catches up with them?

Chabon's giant novel chases such questions across romantic rooftops, through tunnels of irony to its lyrical conclusion. Along the way, Kavalier & Clay finds time for surrealism and highbrow modern art, the Golem of Prague; the gay underground of midcentury New York, and the 1939 World's Fair in Queens. A novel about some very particular artists in these milieus becomes a novel about other kinds of quarreling, collaborating cousins -- escape and reality; America and Europe; art and life.

Michael Chabon was born in 1963 in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Columbia, Maryland and Pittsburgh; he took an MFA from the University of Califonia-Irvine in 1987. By that time he'd more or less finished what became his nationally admired first novel, the coming-of-age story called The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Chabon then spent years on an ambitious false start, a novel about idealism and urban planning called "Fountain City." His frustrations became one ingredient of 1995's Wonder Boys, a novel about a stalled novelist and his runaway protégé. Chabon's proficiencies extend beyond prose to new media; the giant phrenological head on his website, sends perusers to his strange, now-ended adventures with Marvel Comics' X-Men, to a script for an unproduced TV sitcom, and to the mysterious Yiddish travel guide Chabon calls "probably the saddest book that I own."

Chabon now lives in California with his wife, the lawyer and mystery novelist Ayelet Waldman. I caught up with him during his reading tour for Kavalier & Clay, and arranged an interview via email.

-- Stephen Burt