In his debut novel Ways and Means, Daniel Lefferts follows Alistair McCabe, a determined finance student aiming to escape Rust Belt poverty. By spring 2016, his dreams crumble amidst challenging job prospects, mounting student debt, and an unforeseen involvement with a malevolent billionaire. The novel is a dynamic exploration of class, ambition, relationships, and the complex interplay of sex, art, and politics in contemporary society.
Below is a short Q&A with Daniel Lefferts about Ways and Means, followed by an excerpt from the book.
Can you briefly summarize the excerpt you’re sharing with readers today?
These are the opening pages of Ways and Means, and they find the main character, Alistair, in a moment of crisis. We learn that he’s a finance student at NYU who’s gotten himself in deep trouble and needs to flee the city, and we learn the various reasons why that flight will prove difficult: he’s broke, he’s being pursued by powerful people, and he knows that in leaving he’ll break the hearts of the people he cares about most.
What was the writing process like for this specific chapter? What was the hardest part to get right?
Before writing this version of the opening I went through many drafts, and in each of them I faced the same conundrum. Because the book straddles genres and registers—it’s a literary novel but also a thriller, it’s a comic novel but also takes on a fair amount of dark material—I needed to ensure I landed on the right tonal balance. I wanted the opening to be bright, exuberant, and inviting while also establishing the gravity of Alistair’s predicament. Some drafts were too heavy, others were too light. Eventually I found my Goldilocks.
How does this excerpt speak to the rest of the novel?
My goal in writing this opening was to ensure that all the central elements of the novel were to some degree present—not just the principal characters and the general scope of the plot but also the book’s themes and tonalities. It’s my hope that in these pages readers glimpse everything to come: financial desperation, romantic frustration, geopolitical chaos, longing for home.
How did those themes—financial desperation, romantic frustration, geopolitical chaos, longing for home—become of interest to you? Did they all make their way into the novel at the same time or organically find their way into the story?
From the very beginning I knew this would be a book about financial desperation and also romantic frustration. Those exigencies were built into the story I’d devised, and their intersection is of perennial interest to me: I’m fascinated by the ways in which our material desires compound, conflict with, or distort our romantic yearnings. The book’s geopolitical backdrop emerged more organically. I began this novel early in the Trump presidency, and over time the chaos of that era seeped into the book and became part of its larger backdrop. The theme I hadn’t anticipated was longing for home. It crept up on me without my noticing, but now it seems to me one of the things that the book is primarily “about.”
One aspect of books that really makes me love a book is the pace. With a genre-straddling book that leans into thriller, how conscious were you about the pace, or did it come naturally?
I was certainly thinking about thrillers as I wrote this book—John Grisham was as much an inspiration for me as Henry James—and I purposefully called on the conventions of the thriller to ratchet up suspense where it felt appropriate. But the pace of the book also feels of a piece with the hypercapitalistic world in which it’s set. These characters are chasing heedlessly after money, sex, fame, and power, and that rapacity naturally spurs the writing itself. For this reason, I also felt it was important to introduce a slower pace at select moments. I wanted the book to be able to accommodate challenges, even on the level of form, to that crushing relentlessness.
An excerpt from Ways and Means
THE FIRST THING Alistair thought about was the money. At seven that morning he’d left Palladium and marched to the Citibank ATM on Union Square. The total in his account was $600 and change, even less than he’d figured. If he’d known he’d have to flee the city and disappear he would have been more economical in his spending. But you couldn’t give a poor student $10,000 a month and expect him to be entirely shrewd, even if he’s a finance major who’s spent four years learning how to be shrewd if nothing else. It seemed appropriate, in light of this, that he wouldn’t even get his degree.
When he’d returned to his dorm, cash in back pocket, he’d stood dumbly in his room, wondering if he could overdraw his checking account (he knew he couldn’t), wondering if his credit card had a cash-withdrawal option (he knew it didn’t). Mostly he was buying time, another thing he couldn’t afford, until he had no choice but to accept the obvious. Before he left the city he would have to pay a visit to Mark Landmesser and Elijah Pasternak, the couple whom he’d been sleeping with for the better part of a year and whose relationship he was all but certain he’d destroyed.
The night before, after cutting his ties with Nikolai and accepting his final payment from him, Alistair had met up with the couple, hoping to mark the end of his dark days with mind-voiding carnality. Mark and Elijah knew little about Alistair’s job, but Elijah had proposed going out to honor the occasion—in Elijah’s mind quitting a job was more of a reason to celebrate than getting one—and, given the unseasonably warm May air, Alistair had left his jacket, containing his last $10,000, on their couch. At dinner, though, rather than toasting him, Mark and Elijah fought, fought like they never had, and after the bill had been paid Alistair judged it too indelicate to return to their apartment for his cash. He figured he’d go back when the smoke had cleared. But when he returned to his dorm he found Nikolai on the street, waiting for
him, walking back and forth beneath the NYU flag. He told Alistair that the groundskeeper was dead, that they were surely next, and that they needed to vanish immediately.
“Keep it on,” Nikolai said, referring to Alistair’s burner. “I will find you soon. I will come up with a plan. Oh—my friend!”
“Where am I supposed to go?” Alistair said.
“You ask me?” Nikolai said. “What do I know? This is your country! Your crazy fucking country!”
Before Alistair could think to ask him for anything, Nikolai turned and walked off down the street.
He still hadn’t decided where he’d go. Their boss, Herve, had extended his operation far and wide, and he had people everywhere. Alistair’s plan was to get on a Greyhound to California and get off at whatever place seemed halfway suitable for lying low. But no matter where he got off he would need, he was sure, more than $600 and change.
He paced his tiny bedroom in Palladium, five floors above Fourteenth Street. He checked the time—eight-thirty, too soon. He needed to head off any nosiness about his sudden departure, and if he called the men too early and asked after his jacket with undue desperation they would certainly nose. Plus, having worked barely a day in their lives, Mark and Elijah tended to sleep late.
He went to the window and looked up at the sky, into the windows of the office building across the street, down at the sidewalk. The day was bright, the century young, the city rich, the trees abloom. From below came the familiar indecipherable din of cars, cyclists, buses, workers careering their way east and west, each trailed or preceded by a morning-long shadow, each figure appearing from Alistair’s vantage happy, unguilty, free. He looked at the old Consolidated Edison Building across the way, at its colonnade and its clockface. Every night the tower’s electric blue glow shone through his blinds. For years, as he’d drifted off to sleep, Alistair had projected all manner of desires onto this light, had organized all manner of erstwhile cathexes around it. But the light was extinguished now, and, along with it, possibly, him.
He stood over his desk and composed a note to his roommate, who’d left already for their Financial Modeling seminar.
Vidi—
I’m going on a work trip. Can’t-miss opportunity. Won’t be back for graduation. Good luck at Morgan Stanley (not).
Alistair prided himself on having lied not too outrageously. He really was going on a work trip, insofar as he wouldn’t need to go off the grid if it weren’t for the work he’d been unwittingly drawn into, and he really did have a can’t- miss opportunity to avoid being exterminated by Herve.
He began packing. He planned to leave behind enough of his possessions to give credence to his work-trip story but not so many as to overburden which- ever custodian had to clean his room. He’d leave behind most of his toiletries and the majority of his clothes and shoes. He’d leave behind his textbooks. Advanced Corporate Finance, Investments, Distressed Securities, Risk—these would be of no help to him now.
He opened his JPMorgan Chase duffel and loaded it with clothes. He wished he had a different bag to use. After he’d left his internship at the bank the previous summer, in his offerless shame, he’d buried the duffel at the back of his closet and pledged never to look at it again. But his only other piece of luggage was a large suitcase his mother had given him as a high school grad- uation present, and he couldn’t bear rolling around so cumbersome a reminder of her, and he thought it best to pack lightly.
He had to call his mother, of course. But the task of heading off her nos- iness, of navigating the laser maze of her skepticism and worry—of, maybe, talking to her for the last time—was so daunting that he hadn’t let himself really contemplate it, not yet.
He laid in polo shirts, button-downs, chinos, half zips. He would have liked a cruddier, more attention-deflecting getup, but all he had was his Patagonia, his Brooks Brothers, his Club Monaco. He loved this wardrobe, had put himself in debt to amass it, for the very reason he knew it would serve him poorly as a fugitive: it made him bright, made him conspicuous, made him seem like a someone (or rather like an everyone else, but in the most enviable way). He needed clothes more nondescript, drab, unimposing, more befitting of his actual economic station, of the lower-middle-class nothing he’d taken every step over the past four years to leave behind. Instead, wherever he went, he would look
like the finance bro that he was, or that he’d wanted to be. Who he was really, who he wanted to be now: these were questions he would deal with later.
When he finished packing he sat at his desk and opened his laptop. He looked for a last time at his student loans: $100,325. (Alistair found it cruel that a mere three-hundred-odd dollars should mean the difference between his being five figures and six figures in debt. The distinction between these orders of magnitude was too psychologically enormous to be decided by so piddling a sum.) One incidental benefit of disappearing, he’d realized that morning, was that he would no longer be responsible for his loans. He was free of his debt, free of it! For how long had he dreamed of this day? Yet his reprieve brought him none of the joy he’d expected it would, and his impatience for it, his fixation on it, now seemed to him myopic and mean. Cancel your debt, lose your life: he seemed to be living out the definition of a Pyrrhic victory.
He checked his work email: connorblack@phakelos.com. (Alistair had come up with this alias by combining the names of his two favorite porn stars, Connor Maguire and Vadim Black, who, because the world was a cruel and godless place, had never been in a scene together.) He scrolled past emails from his likewise aliased confreres until he reached the last message the groundskeeper had sent. Next to the empty subject line ran a snippet of preview text: Last warning. And if you think I’m making an empty threat, then you are so fucking sadly
In a new tab he navigated to the groundskeeper’s obituary. He realized for the first time how similar the man’s name was to his own, and as he stared at the photograph, a formal Army portrait, he saw afresh their resemblance: blond hair, blue eyes, an expression of doomed Rust Belt naivete. He scanned the text:
. . . passed away unexpectedly . . . donations may be made to the Veterans Mental Health Crisis . . .
Utter bullshit.
All Alistair could remember right now was the groundskeeper’s fidgety niceness. Yes the groundskeeper had blackmailed him, yes he’d gotten himself in deep shit and dragged Alistair and Nikolai into it too. But in the end he was just an upstate kid looking to save his life by taking money from people who had too much of it, and Alistair understood this. In truth there was nothing he understood more.
He was about to return to the groundskeeper’s email, with its nightmarish
images, when he stopped. He didn’t know much about the technological prowess of Herve or his minions, but if they could hack into his computer and determine his whereabouts they would surely try to do so now. He leaned away from his desk, stiff-backed, and picked up his phone. He could wait no longer. He called Mark. Elijah was all jokes, enthusiasms, curiosities: he would ask why Alistair needed his jacket so urgently and, after the blowup at dinner the night before, he would likely inveigh against Mark, trying to solicit Alistair’s partisanship and affirmation, taking up precious time. Mark, by contrast, was all facts and short sentences: he would let Alistair into the apartment, he would give him his jacket, he would say goodbye. They were always like this with each other, Alistair and Mark. Their reticence was a measure of all the
things they wanted to say to each other but didn’t know how.
Mark and Elijah had introduced Alistair to Nikolai, an acquaintance of Elijah’s old art school friend Jay, knowing only that Nikolai did something finance-adjacent and figuring that he could give their down-on-his-luck boy toy career advice. Since then the men had shown minimal curiosity about Alistair’s job, retreating instead into their sundry petty dramas. If this had irked Alistair before, if it had struck him as evidence of their self-absorption, he was grateful for it now. The less the men knew the better, and they knew next to nothing.
Mark answered after two rings, short of breath. “Sorry,” Alistair said. “Are you busy?”
“Hold on,” Mark said. He lowered the phone and made some shuffling sounds. “I’m packing.”
“Packing?” Alistair said. “For what?”
Mark was still catching his breath. “I think last night settled things for me.” “Where are you going?”
“Home. New Jersey.”
The Landmesser Palace, as Elijah called it. “For how long?” “Not sure,” Mark said. “But I’m not renewing.”
During their fight the night before, Mark had threatened not to sign the June 1 renewal on their two-bedroom in the Eros Ananke, the blandly luxurious tower on Cooper Square where he and Elijah lived, entirely on Mark’s dollar. But amid the hundred other ultimatums and aspersions Mark and Elijah had exchanged, while Alistair had bowed his head and tried to stopper his ears, no
single one, and certainly not this one, had sounded particularly consequential. “You’re not serious.”
“I think I am,” Mark said. “Maybe I’m not just a—how did Elijah put it—a suckling pig—something?”
Stuffed to death with his own money. When Elijah wanted to he could really draw blood. “Maybe you two just need a break.”
“I guess we’re about to find out.”
Alistair imagined the men’s apartment strewn with boxes, piles of clothes, the contents of disgorged dressers and shelves. He imagined his jacket, his envelope, his $10,000 in cash, getting lost amid so much upscale flotsam. “Is Elijah there?”
“Gone,” Mark said. “Fled to Jay’s. Naturally.”
Jay Steigen: his center part, his braces, his imperious gaze, his adolescent laugh, his empty contradictory provocations—Alistair couldn’t imagine any- one ever going to him for comfort. But then Elijah’s inclinations, his perverse affections and fascinations, had always puzzled him. He tried to think of a delicate way to broach the subject of his jacket, but Mark saved him.
“I’m glad you called,” he said to Alistair. “I was hoping to see you. Before I left.”
Alistair felt an illogical parental worry on Mark’s behalf. He was thirty and had seemingly limitless family money. Surely he could manage his own affairs or pay someone to manage them for him. Nevertheless Alistair wondered if he knew how to pack a box, hire a mover, terminate a lease. He’d offer to help if he weren’t running for his life. “Can I come now?”
“I’m a little sweaty,” Mark said. “I’ve seen you sweaty,” Alistair said.
Mark gave a laugh, a single rueful exhalation, more like a sigh. “I’ll be here.”
After he hung up Alistair brought his laptop to the bathroom, ran it under the faucet until its screen went black, then stowed it in his desk drawer. He shouldered his duffel and looked at his suite, said goodbye to its bare walls and specked-tile floor, and headed to the elevator.
Downstairs he rushed out of the lobby and turned left toward Broadway. Technically it would be faster to take Third Avenue, but his hours in the city were numbered, and he wanted to treat himself to a true thoroughfare.
On Broadway he found a sidewalk dense with workers in the final footrace of their commute. He held his duffel to his side snugly, weaving, jostling, squinting in the brilliant morning sun. He kept to the curb, dancing around Citi Bike docks and volcanic islands of black trash bags. For a moment he forgot himself, forgot his emergency, forgot his panic, and zeroed in, as he always did, on the most fuckable men. He noted a tan bearded guy in a trim navy suit, two gazelles wearing black workout tops and leggings, a beefcake staring red-facedly into his phone. He spotted a twink who caught his eye and smiled. After a moment, though, his panic returned, and as he passed more men he became more worried that any one of them might be a lackey in Herve’s employ, a hired gun who’d been informed of his general movements and whereabouts and was now set on finding and disappearing him. He began to cruise with a new, terror-inflected purpose. He realized that keeping an eye out for potential assailants and seeking out biceps and succulent backsides were in effect identical activities: that he registered perusers and possible pursuers with the same hyperacute focus and the same libidinal force. It was as if his suspicion had, like a parasite, taken over the mechanism of his desire.
In his paranoia he shifted his attention to objects. He cataloged various instances of material splendor. He counted two Burberry jackets, two Moncler puffer vests, one pair of Persol sunglasses, three Goyard totes, and, on the street, four BMWs, two Range Rovers, and one Porsche. The buildings on either side gave to these objects a kind of vertically oriented velocity, a sense of accumulation and futurity, a climaxward charge. For years Alistair had subsisted on this charge, harnessed it to fuel his studying, working, fucking, fantasizing. But where in the end had all his dreaming led him? To a Greyhound. To nowhere at all.
Excerpt from the new book Ways and Means by Daniel Lefferts published by The Overlook Press ©2024.