Set in 2016 in New York City, "Ways and Means" is about money and becoming aware of the personal dramas caused by it. Author Daniel Lefferts, 35, paints a compelling picture of the strange things cold-hearted capitalism spawns, including the growing threat of disharmonious social forces. But it's quite a feat that the book is also written with great compassion.
The writing itself is razor-sharp and quite complex. Lefferts has delivered a literary novel that is also a dark comedy, a thriller in the mold of John Grisham, and a 21st-century love story. It's also a book about longing for home, as well as a sobering satire of the current American political and economic landscape.
The protagonist is greed-driven finance major Alistair McCabe. He has $100,000 in student debt, no job offers, and an urgency to provide his much-loved mother with enough money to break out of her middle-class existence.
Self-conscious about his social status, he spends his student loan money seeking to impress his peers with just the right beautifully coordinated wardrobe. But ironically, out in the real world where people are really hurting financially, the too-bright-and-clean look may no longer always be an asset.
Alistair's father's extreme ambition, we are told, killed him. And Alistair is determined to follow the same path. Without inquiring about what a lucrative new job entails, Alistair finds work for a fracking billionaire through a shady Eastern European character. The work is "finance-adjacent," helping the poor with "free enterprise. The freest you can imagine." But he soon discovers his employer's treasonous plan to destroy the government's social safety net, and benefit from the resulting misery.
Predictably, the young man ends up having to run for his life from his lunatic billionaire boss. The problem Lefferts highlights is not so much money as people's lack of love and respect for themselves, putting the value of money ahead of their own lives and well-being. Each of the characters has their own unique psychological relationship to money and a self-awareness that makes them endearing.
The free competition of capitalism was a revolutionary, egalitarian idea when it was first implemented in New England, but it only works when tempered by the guiding principles liberty, equality, real charity, and a solid education for all. Otherwise, capitalism inevitably devolves into a predatory economy that enslaves everyone but the top 1-3%, cannibalizes itself, and returns to feudalism.
"Ways and Means" is also a love story between three young men. The protagonist is dating an artistic male couple who are still trying to figure out what role they want to play in the world. The book centers on the spiritual dynamics of their relationship, and the deference that for the most part makes for smooth relations between them.
Together the trio end up burning through the million dollars Mark's family set aside for him, so now Mark must work for his family's mobile home empire. True to the overarching themes of greed and decency in the book, masks fall, fake smiles run out and the situation spirals into violence when his family discovers Mark deals fairly and ethically with their low-income tenants.
Jay, another character in the book, is something of a caricature of an apolitical artist trying to ride the wave of the MAGA movement by painting bacchanalian scenes of men in working class crimson hats. All in all, "Ways and Means" is a brilliant read and a satisfying exploration of the complexities of life in contemporary America.
'Ways and Means,' a novel by Daniel Lefferts, $28, Abrams Books
www.abramsbooks.com
www.daniellefferts.com
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