Daniel Lefferts

Daniel Lefferts’s debut novel, Ways and Means, is a suspenseful and audacious examination of the dynamics of power and money, set against the background of the 2016 election. Of humble origins, Lefferts’s dollar-driven protagonist, Alistair McCabe, ventures to New York City to pursue his dream of getting rich beyond measure. Among the many things he finds along the way are directionless men, adverse art, and the dangers that lurk in the lives of the elite.

In this conversation with Aleah Gatto, Lefferts discusses the intersection of power, money, and politics, shares advice for beating writer’s block, and sheds light on the role of writer for the coming election cycle.

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Aleah Gatto: Thanks so much for joining me today to discuss your debut novel, Ways and Means. In many ways, the 2016 election is the perfect setting for a story about power and money. Altogether, the story feels like a bid to rationalize what happened in 2016, using Trump to draw parallels between the power-hungry, ultra-rich elite and America’s poor. Can you talk about your journey to the moment you decided to write this story?

Daniel Lefferts: I want to say that this novel began life as a short story, but really, I was in a creative writing class in college and the page limit was fifteen. I got to page fifteen and it wasn’t over, but I submitted it. I was twenty-one and that was 2011. It was about Alistair, and in that story it was the same setup: He’s a gay finance student who’s in some sort of criminal trouble, and he’s involved with an older couple. I got great feedback from my professor and graduated college shortly thereafter. I knew I wanted to be a writer and I felt like there was a novel in this character.

Then life happened and I didn’t write productively or consistently for a few years. I went to get my MFA and was writing other things, but I always had this character at the back of my mind. It seemed like a fascinating character and an involving scenario, but I didn’t have a fuller sense of what the novel was about thematically.

By the time I returned to it as a novel, I was twenty-eight and it was 2017. Trump had been elected, and I had followed that election, beginning in 2015, in a very addictive, unhealthy way. But enough time had passed that I was able to highlight an aspect of the election that was especially intriguing to me. I felt that it provided a thematic context for Alistair’s story.

The election was about many things, but I was particularly interested in it as a class drama. Hillary Clinton represented the neoliberal status quo, Bernie Sanders represented a veer toward socialism, and Trump represented the usual slate of conversative economic policies with a brazen demagogic populism laid over top. Alistair comes from a place, Binghamton—which is also where I’m from—that went red in 2016. Before that it had voted Democrat. The anger and resentment that Trump was stoking—there were a lot of people in my region, and in Alistair’s region, who responded to that.

Alistair hopes to go to NYU and become someone who benefits from the promises of the Obama-Clinton neoliberal status quo: free markets, meritocracy, the unchallenged power of the professional class. I thought it would be interesting to place him in a moment when those promises are falling apart, when people like Trump, and to some extent Bernie Sanders, are responding to our loss of trust in those promises.

The story ballooned out from there. I started thinking about another character’s—Mark’s—background. There you have a family that’s benefited from the penury of the lower middle classes—they’ve gotten rich off trailer parks. They hope to sell them to a private equity firm that’s only going to be more exploitative. The election filled out other characters, like Elijah and Jay, in the same way.

It sort of seems old-fashioned now, but I consider myself a social realist. I like to work on big canvases. I like books that take on the whole world. (I also love thin autofiction novels, but I don’t have any interest in writing them.) I was very attracted to the ways in which Alistair’s story could be extrapolated onto a larger canvas.

I was doing some research on other things that you’ve written. I found your essay in The Paris Review, “My Year of Finance Boys,” in which you comically write that the hedge fund analyst you were dating insinuated that you were only “dating him for research.” Joking aside, what sort of research was involved when writing a story rich with money-speak (a language that fiction writers are often not attuned to)?

That’s totally true. It’s easy to name the novels and the writers that do take on finance. You can do it on two hands. I was very interested in Alistair’s class resentment, and in money, but I didn’t really know how it worked in the finance world. The place I started was at Columbia when I was getting my MFA. I audited some undergraduate finance courses. That was research in two ways. One, I did the reading, I went to class, I listened to the professor. I absorbed a lot of the language and the concepts. But it was also research in the sense that I was surrounded by people who were on Alistair’s track. I was in classes with people who wanted to work at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, consulting and financial services more generally. On the way out of lecture, I listened to their conversations, looked at what they wore, things like that.

Over the course of my research, I ended up collecting a lot of information that I wasn’t able to use, but I sort of knew that going in. I was like, “I’m not gonna write a novel where I’m just gonna dump all this knowledge on people.” The goal was always that I wanted to understand the language enough to be able to use it authoritatively when I needed to. When you’re writing about a field in a novel—a specialist field like, say, zoology—the reader doesn’t necessarily want to become an expert in that field. They want to know that you understand it. I think what the readers need are two or three sentences, in the whole novel, that go over their heads. Then they know that you’ve done your research and they can trust you. It takes a lot of research to get to the point where you can deliver two or three sentences.

So far, you’ve talked about how you developed Alistair and his financial understanding. I also want to talk about how your characters so accurately embody the dichotomy of the haves and the have-nots, the artists and the businessmen, who all kind of coalesce together, as you just alluded to. Can you talk about your process for developing such robust and interesting characters? Were there any characters that were exceptionally fun to write? Were there any that were more difficult?

I write biographies for my characters. They’re pretty extensive and a lot of the information doesn’t get used, but that’s the starting point. And it was helpful because a lot of these characters are very different from me. The closest character to me, biographically, is Alistair. We both grew up in Binghamton, we went to NYU, we went to Catholic school, and we’re gay. Even then, he’s so different from me. Mark and Elijah are even more different from me. Jay, the gay MAGA provocateur, and Herve, the right-wing billionaire, are even more different, but I didn’t want to think about them that way—I wanted to be on intimate terms with them.

When it comes to entering a character’s mind, I try to find one thing about them that I really understand. If I can capture that, everything else will bloom around it. I found it surprisingly easy to get into the mindset of Mark, a boarding school rich kid. I didn’t grow up rich and I’ve never been able to really slack off but, fundamentally, I think I share with him a laziness and a passivity in certain areas of my life. Tapping into that was helpful. The same goes for Elijah. I would never consort, as Elijah does, with someone like Jay. But Elijah and I are similar in that we both have a mischief-making streak.

There were two characters who were especially challenging to write, in different ways. One was Maura, Alistair’s mother, just because there was a lot that could go wrong with that character. I was aware that she could get close to a stereotype of a nurturing mother, and I didn’t see her that way. I mean, she is a nurturing mother, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but I didn’t want her to only be that. It was a struggle to get to the parts of her that, I felt, made her really distinct. It’s been nice to hear from readers who say that she’s their favorite character. So maybe I succeeded.

Another character I found hard was Herve. My instinct was to give a lot more information about him and give justifications for why he is the way he is. I settled on this place where I didn’t need to exonerate him with a psychological backstory. I can just let him believe what he believes. I also don’t think that he’s such an implausible character. There are plenty of real-life people—in tech, in politics, in finance, in culture—who dream of reorganizing society in a wildly reactionary way. You have billionaires who talk about founding new countries in the ocean and US politicians who flirt with secession or the ideas laid out in Project 2025. So I leaned back and let Herve believe what he believed and even be calmly explicit about it. He’s like, “This is what I want to do. It may involve violence, but I think it’s what’s right.” I couldn’t fully enter that character, but I didn’t really need to, either. He’s believable.

When you’re writing out your biographies, what’s the point where you start to think about the characters’ interactions with each other?

Some of that is discoveries I make in the moment. I’m a pretty firm outliner. At any given moment in time, I think my outline is final, but it always changes. I remember an addition I made was the scene where Mark and Maura meet: That grew out of getting into their characters so deeply that I realized how similar they are to each other. Also, when I set out, I didn’t really know how Mark, Alistair, and Elijah would feel about each other in their relationship. I knew that they would have a relationship and that it would tear Mark and Elijah apart, but I didn’t quite know how. Only when I started writing scenes did I realize exactly how Mark and Elijah are each using Alistair to their own ends. But also, in a way, Alistair is bouncing off them as he’s going through a moral vacillation of his own. So those are discoveries that I come to more in the moment, which I think is exciting. If you over-determine too much, it can start to feel planned.

On Mark, who you mentioned as the writerly character in the story: He’s kind of lazy, he has a near decade-long writer’s block. What is your own experience living the writing life? Do you have any advice for overcoming writer’s block?

I had a four-year-long writer’s block after college. It wasn’t as glamorous as Mark’s: I unfortunately had to keep working, and that was probably part of it. I just didn’t have as much time. I still work, of course, but I just couldn’t seem to manage it then. But there are a couple things about Mark’s writer’s block that I share and maybe have some wisdom on. One is that—and it’s so simple but it’s really true—every day that you don’t write, it’s harder to write the day that you do write. If I don’t write for a week, my first day back is pretty rough, but I can still do it. A month? That first day might be a total failure. A year? You might feel totally lost for a while. You can always come back, but it takes longer. So for Mark, who doesn’t really write for eight years, it feels almost impossible.

The other thing that’s true for Mark, and that’s true for me and probably for a lot of writers, is that he has suffocating literary influences. I’ve had several friends who are great writers but who are held back by this idea that they’ll never be as good as X. Ultimately, I don’t have that same perfectionism. It seems really hard to surmount. It’s a dangerous thing.

I’ve heard a lot of writers say that, to get anything down on the page, they have to block out the entire world first, then get the words on the page. The world will come in later.

Yeah, I didn’t really read fiction when I was writing Ways and Means. I got to a point where I felt like I was writing the only novel in existence. That sounds grandiose, but it was helpful. I think if I were reading a lot of contemporary fiction it would have messed me up.

Would you say that you write every day now?

In a given week, I always end up not being able to write for a couple of days, but I try to write five days per week, and I try to write between 2,000 and 2,500 words a week. I’m not a fast writer. It takes me a long time. I’m on my third attempt at a new book now. I’ve been writing a lot, but a lot of it isn’t going to see the light of day. I have to be regular about it to get a book out.

We talked about Mark. I’d love to talk now about Elijah, Mark’s long-term boyfriend and aspiring artist, who draws a series of paintings for his undergraduate final that are ultimately censored due to the pro-Nazi figure who made the film that inspired them. Unaware of the film’s Nazi propaganda, Elijah considered the paintings his best work, and “felt misjudged and instrumentalized” after his classmates denounced them. What are your thoughts on censoring art? Have you ever experienced censorship of this kind firsthand?

I’ve never experienced censorship. There were moments when I was writing this book when I thought that one aspect of it—the Jay section—would be too much for people. And this book was rejected by plenty of agents and editors, so who knows if that was an element in it. But I forged ahead and I haven’t received any blowback, so I guess my fears were misplaced. Or the times have changed. We’re a little farther away from the horrors of the Trump administration. (First and only, let’s hope.)

Something unfortunate about the instinct to censorship, I think, is that it damages critical discourse. If the immediate, knee-jerk reaction to something upsetting is to make it go away, we lose out on the possibility for intelligent analysis of why it’s upsetting, why it might be valuable because it’s upsetting, or despite what’s upsetting about it. Some of this censorious instinct has cooled recently, so it’s not something I think about a lot.

Culturally, I think we got used to thinking that censorship was largely coming from the left. Now it seems evident that the real threat comes from the right. When I read about things like book-banning, I feel like the country is run by children. That doesn’t make it better, but it does put it in perspective for me. It’s childish. Especially when it comes to the effort to censor books with LGBT themes. I’m sure any queer writer you ask would respond the same way, but all it does is make me want to dig in my heels. It makes me want to include even more graphic gay content in my next book. It invigorates me.

With the Elijah storyline, I was thinking about a couple of things. I was interested in the ways in which the things we find beautiful have a darkness to them that we might not be aware of. His storyline was my entrée into that theme. I also thought it was important to set up a psycho-history for him that would make him find Jay appealing. Elijah’s asking himself, “What has being safe done for me artistically?” Nothing. And Jay’s asking himself, “What’s the easiest way to get attention if I haven’t been recognized by the artistic community, and maybe don’t have talent?” Be provocative! Elijah comes to see the hollowness of Jay’s provocation, and of his own. But on the other hand, there is something hauntingly beautiful about Elijah’s paintings, and there is something hauntingly entrancing about Jay’s videos, and I think it’s interesting to sit with that discomfort.

Early on, you write, “It was as if the wealth of the city . . . had been forced to take on increasingly contorted shapes to express itself.” There are many other instances in the story where NYC’s architecture acts as a metaphor for larger themes. Can you talk about your relationship with the city as an inspiration, and what else you take inspiration from when you write?

I’m glad you picked up on that. A lot of New York City novels I read tend to highlight either the classical, grand neighborhoods or the gritty ones. Whereas I’ve always been interested, in a very perverse way, in the sterile, new-construction buildings that you see in Midtown West, the Financial District, downtown Brooklyn. To me there’s something alluringly fearsome about those buildings. They’re capitalism in architectural form: banal, efficient, designed to inspire envy and incite economic competition, built mainly for the benefit of the rich. I find them fascinating.

I lived in New York City from when I was eighteen to when I was thirty-three, so it’s always been part of my adult life, and I’ve always been drawn to the parts of it that feel frenzied in this hyper-capitalistic way. You just don’t get that anywhere else in the world. I was just in London, and I went to the City of London, which is their financial district. It was similar to New York in a lot of ways, but it lacked the raw, testosteronal energy of the Financial District. It was more bespoke; it was actually kind of pleasant.

The London tube is so much easier to navigate. I feel like that says a lot about the difference between them. London is much more manageable and New York spirals out in all directions.

Right, and that’s my New York. I don’t feel like it’s every other writer’s New York. When I was writing this book, I spent a lot of time walking around Midtown West and the Financial District, listening to EDM, hyped-up pop—basically the kind of music you can imagine finance bros listening to. These very synthetic songs whose whole purpose is to get your adrenaline pumping. They’re probably conducive to the kind of work those people do. You can imagine these men chewing their Zyn—or they don’t chew it, I don’t know how Zyn works, maybe you just put it in your mouth—or ripping their vape pens while listening to that music. It was exciting to get into that mental space.

You mentioned before how you plan things out and make something like a storyboard. What was the most surprising thing that you found while you were writing the novel that you didn’t plan for?

When I conceived of the novel, I was in love with this idea of an attractive but harsh world. I was interested in creating a high-octane novel with characters who were moving in systems of money, having sex detached from romance. So something that surprised me the more I wrote (in a good way—I think it makes the novel) is that it ended up being a lot more about love than I thought it would be. Since the book has come out, a comment I get a lot is—and I don’t know if I agree with this necessarily—“It’s ultimately about love. It’s a love story.” I don’t know if I would use those words, but it echoes my own surprise as I was writing it. I don’t hate it.

Looking back, the love between Alistair and his mother and even Elijah and Mark, and then Mark and Alistair, act as a balance to everything else. The love makes the chaos more poignant.

I love the contrast. The more brutal the world of your novel is, the more sentimentality you can get away with. I was like, “I can also have genuine love here because, frankly, the world of the book needs it.”

Were there any moments of frustration that you encountered in the writing process? If so, how did you overcome them?

I am a terrible reviser, which isn’t a great quality. The main plot with Alistair and Herve had to undergo some serious revisions to the point where the book as I originally conceived it became significantly different. I also didn’t quite know how it was going to end in terms of Herve, and that really bothered me. At a certain point, I was starting to get close enough to the end that I had to start anticipating it. Even if you’re not telling the reader what’s going to happen, what’s going to happen should be in the rhythm of the sentences before you get there. It can’t come out of nowhere. So I was frustrated for a while. You have these days when you’re like, “I’ll never figure it out. It’s hopeless.” You feel awful. Then the next day you figure it out.

It seems like it was all worth it because everything I’ve heard about your novel has been positive. Since it’s come out, have you received any critiques that you disagree with, or any that you’ve really learned from?

I’ve gotten feedback that the book feels pretentious because I sometimes use elevated vocabulary. I probably should learn from that, but I unfortunately feel stubborn about it. Sometimes one word is not an exact synonym for another. Sometimes it has a sound that has its own emotional valence, and it’s just better for the moment than the simpler word. People are always saying we should learn new languages, which is absolutely true, but if you ask someone to learn words in English they don’t know, you’re an elitist. I see a contradiction in that.

Another point of feedback that I’ve received is that I have a tendency to over-explain things. That’s something I’m working on as I continue to write. I think it comes down to trusting the reader, and that’s very hard. I kind of like that aspect of Ways and Means—that it seeks to explain the whole world—but you might get a totally different and equally beautiful effect from pulling back.

You’ve been alluding to it: We’re almost officially in the election cycle. In many ways, the 2024 election is gearing up to look a lot like it did eight years ago. How are you bracing yourself for the political turmoil that is sure to come? What are your hopes for the literary landscape throughout the coming election cycle?

It’s dangerous to feel hope, but I must say I do feel hopeful. At the same time, I’m refraining from following the election too rabidly. At this point in the cycle in 2015, I was reading the Politico morning newsletter every day. I can’t do that now. Also, everything’s less new: We know how bad the first Trump presidency was, and we know a second one could be a lot worse. So I don’t know that I’m fully in the news addiction phase yet. I might hold off a little longer.

Regardless of what happens, I think it’s important to remember that literature moves on a very different time scale than politics or current events, and I think that’s to literature’s benefit. It’s hard to expect a novelist, or a literary nonfiction writer, to respond in the moment to an election in a way that reflects their full artistic potential. It takes time, and what might come out might not reference directly the course of events that they’re responding to.

In 2016, we saw a lot of earnest writing that tailed the “resistance,” which is now kind of a dirty word, or just a laughable word. And there was definitely something stilted about some of that writing. People don’t come to literature to have their beliefs affirmed. If that happens, that’s fine, but there has to be something else. That was the main event of some of that writing: the affirmation of our prior beliefs.

At the same time, I see a worrying trend in literary discourse where people are so allergic to progressive earnestness that they can only make fun of it, or they toy with reactionaryism as a response to its supposed lameness. Or they want to move away from politics altogether—they don’t want to read about it, they don’t want to write about it. I disagree with that instinct. The antidote to ideological fiction is not fiction that ignores politics altogether. But writing about politics is very difficult when there seem to be no novel insights or positions to put forth. With Ways and Means, I was conscious of that. So I wanted to focus specifically on the class aspect, and I was also interested in the psychological, libidinal impulses that I saw at work during that political moment. Those things felt deeper to me—under the surface.

In general, good political novels about the Trump era are few and far between. One I just read not too long ago that I really liked is Godwin, the new novel by Joseph O’Neill. On its surface it’s not explicitly about that time. It’s about capital flows across borders, colonialism, exploitation, and race. But the year is 2015, and just knowing that adds pressure to the story. At the very end, there’s one acknowledgement of the election. It’s just enough to cast a light back over the novel that makes you think about it in a different way. It’s very subtle. Subtlety’s hard. It’s never the first instinct when you’re in a heated political moment.

What, to you, is the role of the writer for whatever may come?

A big part of why I write—what I see as my purpose—is to keep the sensibilities fresh and buoyant and alive to the different textures of life. I’m very drawn to fiction that renews my senses, renews my language, breaks up the grooves of my thinking, and gives me a style to think with, whether that comes in the form of a vocabulary, or rhythm, or tone. It gives you a new lens to see the world through. Maybe that’s a political lens, or maybe it’s simply an attitude. After I read My Year of Rest and Relaxation, I basically lived as that narrator for a week. And while I was glad that week came to an end (because that is not a sustainable way to live), I feel that my life is richer for having had that style entered into my DNA. I feel like more of a person, more of a mind, because of it.

Aleah Gatto is a writer and reader based in New York City. She holds a BA in English with a concentration in Writing from the University of Vermont. Her poetry and prose have been featured in Aerie International Magazine, Apprentice Writer, Jet Fuel Review, and Orange Island Arts, among others. She spends her free time writing and getting lost in the woods.