Brenner DesJardins Magill, a tiny girl with a name befitting a literary giant, attended her first Bee Book Club event Thursday night.

She is 6 weeks old and she arrived in a stroller, courtesy of her mom, Kari, and her dad, Jordan, who happens to be an aspiring writer.

"I'm working on my first novel," explained Jordan Magill, a recent transplant to Sacramento from the East Coast and a fan of novelist Michael Chabon. "I've read everything he's written. His use of language is absolutely sublime."

So Magill could not resist the opportunity to see Chabon in person and to absorb some of his writing secrets. The family joined more than 700 other people at the Scottish Rite Center for The Bee Book Club's first gathering of the new year.

Chabon, author of "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" and "Wonder Boys," focused his discussion on his latest and most celebrated novel, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," which last year won the Pulitzer Prize for literature. The book follows the exploits of a young Jewish artist from Brooklyn and his cousin from Prague, who create a comic book superhero called the Escapist to fulfill their fantasies of power and freedom.

Dressed in a plaid shirt, blue jeans and scuffed shoes with unruly leather strings, Chabon talked about the birth of "Kavalier & Clay," which was inspired by the author's love of comic books and by long conversations with his father about life in America during and after World War II. Much of the rich cultural experience of that era -- such as the corner candy store and radio comedy programs -- had disappeared by the time Chabon read his first comic book in the late 1960s, he lamented.

"This is a recurrent obsession of mine, this idea that there could be an entire world of things that has completely vanished," he told the audience. This "lost world" provides one of the settings of "Kavalier & Clay," which has been described as a carnival ride through American pop culture.

Chabon, who insisted his achievements have done little to stem his insecurities, said the book's success was a bit of a surprise.

"When I first hit on the idea, I was far from certain that anyone would want to read it," he said. His doubts were rooted partly in what he called the "geek factor" associated with people who read comic books.

"I am a geek," he said. "My name is Michael Chabon and I am a geek."

Chabon shared a few other personal insights, prompted by questions from the audience.

* On the research process for "Kavalier & Clay": "I spent day after day for weeks and months paging through Newsweek magazines that were 50 or 60 years old." He also interviewed comic-book creators, studied photographs from the era and "spent a lot of time walking around New York with a 1939 guide to the city."

* On his efforts to balance his writing career with his duties as a husband and father: "I just neglect my children. I find that works for me," he said jokingly. Actually, Chabon confided, he and his wife share household duties, but he does escape occasionally to a "cottage or cabin or hovel" to write.

* On his favorite fiction writers: "John Cheever ... Edgar Allan Poe ... Alice Munroe ... Flannery O'Connor. It's a very long list."

* On why he turned down People magazine's request to include him as one of its 50 Most Beautiful People: "I didn't even think about it for half a second. To be put on display like that ... just feels wrong to me."

* On the resilience of his characters: "To me, a good story is fundamentally a story of someone enduring, of overcoming."

Many in the audience Thursday seemed to have writing aspirations of their own, including a high school student looking for an excuse to skip his mathematics courses.

"As a successful writer," the student asked Chabon, "have you ever come remotely close to using pre-calculus?"

"No," the author confessed with a smile.

The Bee's Cynthia Hubert can be reached at (916) 321-1082 or chubert@sacbee.com.

• Excerpt from "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay"