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Now available for preorder:
The San Francisco Panorama.
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- - - - Copyright 2003 The Chronicle Publishing Co.
- - - - SECTION: CHRONICLE MAGAZINE; Pg. 4; NEIGHBORHOODS LENGTH: 812 words HEADLINE: A Novel Idea; Finding a literary niche in the Elmwood BYLINE: Sam Whiting BODY: Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman keep to a rigid schedule at their Berkeley brown-shingle home in Elmwood. He writes at night. She writes by day. The system has worked for nine novels in 10 years, and in passing, four kids in nine. During the shift change at 3:30 p.m., Waldman takes half the kids for a walk to Star Market, their corner store. There is some chaos during the departure, but Waldman is used to that. Her first name is pronounced "I yell it," and that 's what she did after taking the call that her husband had won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay." All of Elmwood knew her joy then. Berkeley is a big city, but the Elmwood, as locals call it, is a small town north of the Rockridge BART station. The neighborhood Waldman and her kids walk is a triangle bordered by College Avenue at the base, Claremont Avenue up the hypotenuse and Prince Street back down. At the apex is Claremont - surely the shortest and most practical shopping strip in all of Berkeley. In one block it has three bookstores, a store selling Craftsman bookcases, a bakery with lattes and an old-time grocer. "It's like we were born to live here," says Waldman, who was born in Israel and raised in New Jersey. Chabon is from Maryland. They met in New York on a blind date, and three weeks later Waldman proposed. Their move to San Francisco, "was all a misunderstanding," she says, pushing a stroller along. "We really didn't know each other. We'd only just met when we got engaged. Neither of us felt confident enough to say we didn't want to go." Once they were married and knew each other a little better, they drew up a chart to avoid any misunderstandings on where to raise a family. The candidates were San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. "We assigned point values to everything," she says. "Where we had family, quality of the schools, what your hair looks like in different climates." This last criterion is probably more important to him than her, but in the end all three cities tallied 350 points. Rather than corrupt their system, they compromised on Berkeley. While renting, they walked by an Arts and Crafts house undergoing renovations, then hurried back home to write a few novels to afford it. First they had to convince the owner to sell. They started leaving handwritten notes, which the owner probably wishes he'd kept. Since he finally buckled six years ago, Chabon and Waldman have become one of the most famous writing couples in America. At 40, Chabon has published four novels and two short-story collections. In half the time, Waldman, 38, has published five books in her series of Mommy-Track Mysteries. "Death Gets a Time-Out" came out this month. Fame is evident when Waldman and her daughters Sophie, 8, and Ida-Rose, 2, go into Star Grocery. Posted is a recent full-page color picture of a pregnant Waldman with Chabon and three of the kids from People magazine. Star is "the center of it all," Waldman says. "We're here at least once a day, sometimes three times." This time Sophie takes care of the transaction. "How much is it?" she asks the clerk. "$5.57." She writes it on the chit, then slowly signs her name in the careful cursive her father taught her. Next to Star is the Craftsman Home, a store specific to the needs of Elmwood and Claremont. "A high percentage of my clients are within a mile of here," says owner Lee Jester. Many of the homes were built between 1900 and 1920 at the height of the Arts and Crafts philosophy of "simple, unadorned architecture with a lot of exposed wood and hand-hewn elements," he says. The Chabon home, partially furnished by the Craftsman, has been around since 1907. Waldman had this verified by accident while browsing in Turtle Island Book Shop. Thumbing through "Picturing Berkeley: A Postcard History," her eye caught her own address on a card sent to a "Miss Lois Shafer" postmarked Feb. 18, 1908. Turtle Island is at the tip of the triangle, connecting Claremont to College on a row of "smaller houses that are perfect examples of the Berkeley style," Waldman says. "There's stucco, shingle, traditional bungalows." At College, they often turn right for chocolate milk shakes in the tin at Ozzie's Fountain. It is inside the Elmwood Pharmacy, which turns up as a setting in Waldman's literary novel, "Daughter's Keeper," due in October. Pushing the stroller home, Waldman tells the story of the time Chabon pushed it down College, losing Ida-Rose's blankie along the way. "By the time I came home, they were all just sitting around the living room crying," Waldman recalls. "I think that ultimately Michael sustained the most permanent damage." Maybe someday he will turn the trauma into fiction, but not now. "The pain is too deep." E-mail Sam Whiting at swhiting@sfchronicle.com. GRAPHIC: PHOTO, Rosie, 11, greets her owner, Marsha Day, in Berkeley's Elmwood district. / Photograph by Penni Gladstone LOAD-DATE: July 29, 2003 - - - -
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