As an undergraduate at NYU, Daniel Lefferts found mythical beings: students at the Stern School of Business. They eschewed the de rigueur American Apparel hoodies and skinny jeans in favor of Patagonia vests, khakis. Fascinated by their separate world, Lefferts wrote a story for a creative writing class about a finance student who’s in deep financial trouble and gets involved with an older couple.
The 2016 election supercharged Lefferts’ interest in class narratives. He sought to write a literary, financial drama, drawing inspiration from Michael Clayton, Succession, and the work of social realists: Henry James, Edith Wharton, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens.
Lefferts’ debut novel, Ways and Means (Overlook, 2024), builds upon the world he’d first imagined as a college student in ever inventive ways. In his final year at Stern, Alistair meets Mark and Elijah, a wealthy couple caught in the inertia of their staggering wealth, impending thirties, and stagnating relationship. In abundant prose, Lefferts takes a social force that’s anonymous—the billionaire—and makes it embodied, though only somewhat, forever an unknowable specter dogging Alistair. The novel is a financial thriller and a literary force. Lefferts brings together political intrigue, capital, and three men exploring the triangular dynamics of their relationship in a way that is highly original and achingly human. Not a sentence in the book flags.
We met over Zoom to speak about the novel, the emotions of money, the challenges and opportunities of writing throuple narratives, and Bret Easton Ellis.
Michael Colbert: The book takes a searing look at the money behind art and ruminates on art’s utility. How deeply entangled do you think money is with the production of and creativity behind art?
Daniel Lefferts: My mind is always going to the economic circumstances and realities behind something. Sometimes I wish it would work differently because it can be a cold way of looking at the world. But I think you see how some writers and artists come from money and some don't. That allows some people to devote more time to it than others. I was thinking about that with Mark and Elijah. It's interesting to me that sometimes financial freedom does not actually pay artistic dividends. And then sometimes it does: you also have Jay, who economically is probably the closest to Alistair for much of his life, but he's a very productive artist.
I’m also sensitive to the ways in which the market demands—what kinds of books people want to buy, the debt a lot of people take on to study fiction—bend, warp, or maybe even fruitfully organize your artistic efforts. I'm interested in art that critiques the market, but I'm also interested in art that is not blind to the market and interacts with it in interesting ways. I guess I reject the idea of art being this pure realm outside of the market, and I'm more interested in the ways that it is influenced by and influences it.
MC: The book builds an interesting discussion around capital and accumulation with gay men––whether through the prism of sexual partners, money, or beauty. Does that become a vehicle that’s empowering or debilitating? Do the men learn to manipulate it for their own benefit?
DL: I think it's hard to understand a romantic or erotic attachment outside of the forces of financial need and the forces of the market. I don't know if it's necessarily a good thing or a bad thing that part of Alistair’s erotic interest in Mark and Elijah has to do with the fact that they have a lot of money. I don't know if it's good or bad that Elijah's enduring attachment to Mark is partly financial. I think it'd be easy to say that is a form of economic forces corrupting this sort of pure love.
One thing I did purposefully in the novel is that, at the outset, Elijah gloms onto Mark, who has a trust fund just shy of a million dollars. Then later, even though that money is slowly disappearing, Alastair gloms onto them. At the end of the novel, things are flipped. I don't think in either of those situations just because there's an economic imbalance there's not a real romantic connection. I just think those things are inextricable.
MC: I also love all the very consumerist passages where Alistair is buying things. It’s so seductive. If you get a little bit of money, there can be an eroticism to spending it.
DL: As I was writing this novel, another thing I noticed in a lot of contemporary fiction is that authors either didn't really talk about money in their characters’ lives, or they talked about it in an unspecific way. I would constantly be asking myself, “Okay, exactly how much money is this person making? What's their rent? If they have $10,000 in credit card debt, and then six months later, it's still $10,000 and they haven't paid it, how does that work?” I would get frustrated with the haziness of the financial details.
I think a larger frustration was that money was not presented as being part of the emotional landscape of the characters. I think money is very emotional. It's not to the side of our pure human feelings of love and resentment—it's in the mix with those. Alistair buying a Canada Goose parka is an extremely emotional moment for him. Mark and Elijah having this two-bedroom in downtown Manhattan is very emotional for him. I don't think that that's ridiculous, and I don't think it's unimportant.
MC: Absolutely. I think that also connects in a really rich way to the throuple; Alistair can slip into this more secure world through the backdoor. I want to discuss those relationship dynamics. Did you encounter any unique narrative challenges in writing the story of a relationship between three men that doesn't follow the neat marriage plot?
DL: I think it would have been hard to introduce all of these characters as they're meeting each other. Developing character while they’re developing their relationship in a triangulated fashion seems very cumbersome and unwieldy. I think it was important that the book starts when things are blasting apart, and you get to know each character individually. Then, by the time you get to the scenes where they're getting to know each other and loyalties are starting to divide, you already know a lot about them.
For better or worse, I think the sex scenes were the places where I let the tensions between them rise. I never conceived of it as an egalitarian situation. I think with the pretense of it being an experiment where Mark and Elijah are the couple and Alistair’s the interloper, it made sense that in the bedroom we would see that that was, in fact, not the case. I really seized on the sex scenes to build those tensions.
MC: This line captured that for me: “What vexed Alistair was that each man was allowed to be only one person, to occupy only his one defined self, while he, in order to satisfy both men’s desires, had to be two people…without any clear idea of which person he really was.”
DL: That’s why I really liked this three-way situation. When you have the hero of your novel, the classic structure is that they have these good qualities and they have some flaw. It’s not as simplistic with Alistair, but I thought it'd be really interesting to play those out through two other people. His attraction to Elijah intensifies in moments when he needs a reprieve from his guilt and his uneasiness about his work with Nikolai. Then his attraction to Mark intensifies when he wants to go in the other direction and live according to different moral principles. You asked about narrative challenges, but in a way the throuple was a great narrative solution to mapping out Alistair’s shifting priorities; there's a person that you can put him onto when he’s feeling different ways.
MC: It would be really easy to say that Alistair is using each of the men at different points to satisfy a particular need, but I think it's a lot more human. He’s attracted to both men for certain reasons, based on what he’s looking for. I hadn't seen that in fiction and it feels true to life. He acts upon certain desires within a larger set of desires.
DL: Someone could also say they're using him, but I don't think that's necessarily true. They’re getting something out of him —is that the same as using him? I’m glad it came across as messier and more human than that, because that was definitely my intention.
MC: I’ve seen this discussion online where readers conflate the position of the characters with the position of the novel. I was really impressed by how clearly each character's worldview develops in distinct, and sometimes risky ways. How did you build these complex and human points of view?
DL: I think that if you go into any character deeply enough, it's hard for them to come across as plainly bad. This idea that an immoral character needs to be clearly demarcated from the narrator's voice—that doesn't really make a lot of sense to me, and it's just not how I read fiction or how I write it. I think the third person was really helpful in that respect. Something I took from Jonathan Franzen, whose characters do terrible things, is that the narrative voice always has an aroma of irony. The distance between the narrative voice and the character can change. He can make fun of a character and then go right back up against the character's emotions. I think that flexibility is helpful.
I was very interested in the ways in which the things that we find beautiful are beautiful for dark reasons. I don't think that we are always drawn to things that are uplifting and upstanding. Alistair is entranced with capitalism and finance, and one can make an argument that those things have completely destroyed our world. Elijah is fascinated by the type of physical male beauty that has been used by authoritarian governments to promote a fascistic worldview. I wanted to sit with the characters in that, but being able to loosen myself from that perspective and then go back into it I think was helpful.
MC: Speaking of the darkness, I’m dying to talk to you about Bret Easton Ellis and The Shards. It looks like you loved the book.
DL: Oh my god. I finished it a couple months ago, and I've decided it's on my top ten. Before I wrote this book, I wasn't a big Bret person. I didn't read The Shards when it came out. I just read it, and I think that it feels like the culmination of everything he's about. It feels like a lifetime magnum opus. It was really validating to read that book and know that it marked a return to popularity for him. That book is relentlessly dark and relentlessly gay, and those things are very tied together. That's obviously where my interest lies, so it was really exciting. What did you think?
MC: I loved it. It was my favorite last year. I thought nothing captured and dramatized the paranoia of the closet more than The Shards. I got completely lost in that world.
DL: He turned the paranoia of the closet into a slasher thriller, and I think gay men can say it has that intensity to it. In the world of that book, the fact that Matt Kellner dies, it's almost like, “Because I had a gay relationship with him, and because that's so bad and secret, of course, he died.” I was amazed by that book. I loved it. The book seems to be wildly popular, but I think there were moments where I really wondered if non-gay men will quite understand how that cuts to the bone of the gay experience in a lot of strange ways. I was totally blown away.