Gary Shteyngart Believes in Living the Good Life

Style|Is Gary Shteyngart One of the Last Novelists to Make Real Money From the Craft?

Gary Shteyngart liked the stick. It was a handsome, polished staff called a shillelagh, used in Ireland for walking and the occasional cudgeling. This one was on sale at the Armoury, a high-end men’s clothing shop in TriBeCa that could double as an Ivy League library.

“I’m in love with this thing,” he said of the shillelagh, which was made by Fox Umbrellas of London. President John F. Kennedy, who came to embody Ivy cool, had been a Fox enthusiast. Now, so was Mr. Shteyngart, the bespectacled 53-year-old Russian American novelist. “This might be my new way of living,” he said.

Having recently turned into an unlikely men’s style icon with a penchant for crisp martinis, tailored suits and vintage watches, Mr. Shteyngart could credibly entertain the purchase of a $250 stick, even if doing so might make him look like one of the insecure, status-obsessed Manhattanites who populate his novels. The most recent of those, “Vera, or Faith,” about a precocious Korean American girl growing up in a privileged Manhattan household while the nation descends into an all-too-familiar mix of extremism and indifference, is out now.

Mr. Shteyngart had been working on another novel — long and complex, involving spies — when David Ebershoff, Mr. Shteyngart’s longtime editor at Random House, invited him to lunch at the restaurant Blue Ribbon in Midtown Manhattan in the fall of 2023. Mr. Ebershoff broke some bad news: Mr. Shteyngart’s epic was not working.

Mr. Shteyngart, who had been having his own doubts, sat silently for a few moments. “And then he put his finger up in the air and said, ‘I have another idea,’” Mr. Ebershoff recalled. That idea — his new novel, coalesced into a manuscript in just 51 days. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” the editor said, praising the author’s “new level of emotional openness.”

Mr. Shteyngart’s sartorial tastes have also deepened. “I used to be so against dressing up,” he said, as Daniel Greenwood, the Armoury’s director for U.S. sales, outfitted him in an ocean blue City Hunter jacket, made in Hong Kong from Irish linen and selling for $1,000. Born and raised in chilly Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Mr. Shteyngart had transformed into a Mediterranean flâneur, ready to face a New York City afternoon in late spring.