Ways and Means

In Daniel Lefferts’s searing debut novel Ways and Means, a striving finance student confronts the line between ambition and greed, and the disordered politics of his era.

Alistair McCabe comes to New York with a plan. Young, handsome, intelligent, and gay, he hopes to escape his Rust Belt poverty and give his mother a better life by pursuing a career in high finance. But by the spring of 2016, Alistair’s plan has come undone: His fantasy banking job has eluded him and he’s mired in student debt. In his desperation, he’s gone to work for an enigmatic billionaire whose ambitions turn out to be far darker than any Alistair could have imagined. By the time Alistair uncovers his employer’s secret, his life is in danger and now he’s on the run.

Meanwhile, Alistair’s paramours, an older couple named Mark and Elijah, must face their own moral and financial dilemmas. Mark, nearing the end of his trust fund, takes a job with his father’s mobile-home empire, which forces him to confront the unsavory foundations of his family’s wealth, while Elijah, a failed painter, hitches his wagon to an artist-provocateur engaged on a project that makes the country’s political chaos into a thing of alluring, amoral beauty. As the nation hurtles toward a breaking point, Alistair, Mark, and Elijah must band together to save one another and themselves.

Propulsive, exuberant, and profoundly observed, Ways and Means is an indelible, deeply moving investigation of class and ambition, sex and art, and politics and power in 21st century America.