For a novel as transfixed by the old-fashioned geometry of social relations as Ways and Means (Harry N. Abrams, 2024), Daniel Lefferts’s gay coming-of-age debut, the conditions of the historical moment could hardly be less propitious. The plot is set in New York around the time of the 2016 presidential election—though, excepting references to the impending Trump–Clinton slug-off and the plot’s increasing dependence on that battle for its effects, the period could as easily be ours, eight years along the line.
This is a world in which the “ways and means” of the novel’s title are no sure thing, in which the relationship of the protagonists to the money they have (or don’t have) easily exceeds tangible causality. Massive student debt, staggering rental costs, and the sheer expense of everything at all times: these punctuating pseudo-realities of modern America impress upon the novel’s characters with an added urgency when its ethical commitments are brought into play. Invested as it is in Austenian questions of social matchmaking, which include the authorial directive to make worthy characters rich and insincere or hypocritical characters poor, Ways and Means suggests what happens when relations are so imbalanced and the sources and effects of wealth so nebulous as to make the idea of pairing off all but impossible.
Not the least of the novel’s commentaries upon money and power comes in the form of its central character. Alistair is a conscientious high school student in poor upstate New York whose eyes are trained firmly on the city. A gifted and committed student of literature, Alistair is also a congenital social misfit whose nascent sexual awakening makes him a target for the bullies he holds at once in contempt for their demonstrable meat-headedness and in subdued awe for their capacity as sexual prompts. This early exposure to a conflict at the heart of his desires motivates the immediate mechanics of the plot, causing Alistair to switch to a business track at NYU Stern, a decision made in the hope of cowing his assailants by the strength of his achievement. That this scheme works, and that Alistair earns his bullies’ grudging respect, has the more significant effect of connecting his sexuality to the attainment of power and prestige—a sorry miscalculation, in this world obsessed with sums and figures, which he will spend the final sections of the novel righting.
Early in a carnally liberating series of Manhattan excursions, Alistair is picked up at a gay bar by a couple of older men, Mark and Elijah, whose increasingly sexless relationship is in serious need of renewal. Mark is a trust-fund baby whose dispassionate lack of curiosity about the world helpfully prevents him from asking questions about his father’s business; Elijah is a failed photographer whose risqué college art projects set him up to be a kind of latter-day David LaChapelle, if only he had the wherewithal to make good on a demonstrated saturation in gay aesthetics. Both men live fecklessly off Mark’s inheritance, a figure so astronomical as to provide a kind of negative symmetry with Alistair’s enormous student loan, his excess rhyming with Alistair’s lack. As the novel progresses, this deficit transcends thematic underscoring, compelling Alistair to seek a loan from his lovers and then, when this proves insufficient, to find employment on a dodgy financial scheme run by one of their billionaire associates. This exposure to vulnerabilities at once romantic and financial also results in the plot’s dénouement when Alistair, on the run from his vengeful boss’s hired heavies, is forced to flee to Brazil and live under an assumed name.
Previous outings of self-discovery have seemed to teach Alistair the measure of his own worth or at least a certain version of it. The stares of the assembled punters at a venue in Midtown a few weeks into his studies cause him to make the “honest, empirical estimate” that he was “one of the five or ten most attractive people in the bar”. The Grindr app’s encouragement of such hyper-numeracy suggests, in this matter at least, that Alistair’s is a collective rather than an individual form of madness. Yet where those escapades resulted in one-night affairs, in which time set limits on the otherwise impressive exhaustibility of Alistair’s partners’ sexual roles (“they rode him cowboy and then, without dislodging his dick, swiveled around and rode him in reverse”, notes the narrator, in a coolheaded passage, of some of Alistair’s many conquests), the arrangement Mark and Elijah propose is of a different kind. For all its fascination with gay licentiousness, Ways and Means is a novel about love.
“Oh,” Mark responds “in wounded surprise,” when Alistair asks him if he is only the latest in a series of assignations: “We’re not like that.” Instead, the dance the three men set themselves—which accommodates the delicate balance of a reanimated sex-life within the traditional bounds of a monogamous relationship, notwithstanding the increase in personnel—says something about the stylistic ambition and scope of the novel generally. Its aim seems less to demolish heteronormativity than to renovate its dilapidated interiors. Lefferts’s writing, at the novel’s best and most sexually explicit moments, carries all the confidence of a prose unruffled by the possibility that the experiences it recounts might prove controversial to the imagined reader. If this doesn’t amount exactly to a straight-acting prose, it does at least suggest ways in which gay fiction might be doing an adventurous, even miraculous thing simply by describing unusual or unexamined experiences.
This was the discovery made by Edmund White when he left behind the closeted and implicit baroque style of his early novels, where gayness was left to shimmer obliquely at the description’s jeweled surface, in favor of a more tersely direct statement of drama and event. Like White’s fiction, Lefferts’s writing assumes the subject-matter to be sufficiently underrepresented—and thus sufficiently novel—that it can carry Ways and Means along in its narrative’s propulsive energy. This doesn’t mean the novel becomes leaden or workaday in such instances. On the contrary, the excitement of these moments emerges out of describing the sex-act in novel and surprising ways; as when Elijah, in a scene late in the narrative, goes through the preparatory operations of bottoming: “deep breaths, a teaspoon of lube here and a teaspoon there, an ambassadorial finger, more deep breaths, and then, after the wince-inducing surprise of the dildo’s coldness, after some resistance from a rectum lately disaccustomed to rigidity, success.” Much of the freshness of the description, of course, depends on the well-appointed placement of that “ambassadorial,” but the clever melding of high and low seems justified even beyond the adjective’s capacities at puncturing the image’s unvarnished rawness. Even the descriptive choice to measure the lube by teaspoons implies that something basically domestic is being tampered with. The surprising image calls to mind a description early on in Alistair’s adventures, of his watching “his dick push and pull” around the hairs of a casual paramour’s anus, a visual effect he compares to “strip curtains at a car wash.” This suggests a routine, presexual world being departed from as surely as it is invoked, that in this, gay sex and the coming-of-age formula itself might belong together as natural bedfellows.
Lefferts, in fact, writes so well about gay sex that the limpness of the novel’s plot mechanics becomes more obvious by the comparison. As we head into the familiar buzz and whirr of the 2016 news cycle, Ways and Means starts to conform to what Adam Mars-Jones, citing Milan Kundera, calls the flaw inherent to the roman à clef. It is like a jacket you turn inside-out as soon as purchasing, since the only matter of interest is the lining. Here is a rapacious and closeted tech billionaire with an axe to grind and right-wing politics to promulgate (a thinly-disguised Peter Thiel); a controversial multi-level marketing company that may enclose a larger story about the vagaries of American capitalism (for the novel’s CommonWay, read Amway); here, even, is a brashly organized and presumably badly photographed sponsors’ gala, in which hairless boys in their late teens and early twenties pose semi-naked in made-to-order MAGA hats, a nod to Lucian Wintrich’s ludicrous PR stunt, “Twinks for Trump.”
With an increasing tendency to cover material surely familiar to the reader, an impatience with the texture of experience begins to predominate. The writing becomes hurried, breathless, even exhortatory, devoting increasing space to outraged, unmediated opinions that would find favor in a Times op-ed, and that demonstrate little pressure or tension exerted at the hands of the novel’s characters. “Trump, by now the presumptive GOP nominee, continued to inundate the country with deranged invective, and the media, fascinated in its indignation, continued to magnify his voice,” runs a representative passage; Trump “metastasized his following by stirring hate” and “smacked the people with the same hand out of which he promised to feed them” runs another.
So dominant does this kind of writing become that it can be easy to miss the wise and even important story Lefferts’s novel has to tell about power in sexual relations, a finding that easily surpasses whatever contribution it wants to make about the discourse surrounding orange chat-show hosts. Early in his Mark–Elijah entanglement, the novel registers Alistair’s disaffection with the confusing position in which his role places him: they each were “allowed to be only one person, to occupy his one defined self, while he, in order to satisfy both men’s desires, had to be two people—upstanding or degraded, kind or cruel, gentle or hard-charging as the moment demanded—without any clear idea of which person he really was”. Yet Alistair’s predicament holds only up to a certain point, his reluctance to bottom imposing a limit on the genuine fluidity in his exploration of social roles. That his final decision to attempt the often-painful position should come when he has jettisoned involvement in fraudulent and exploitative financial schemes provides an index to the novel’s changing priorities. Yet the writing itself is achingly self-conscious about the agency being lost and the path to liberation that might come from that abandonment: “All his past strivings, in school and work,” notes the narrative voice, “had amounted to one great thrusting out and forth, one great convexity. This was different, this was a collapsing: not a triumph but a failure, not an acquisition but a renunciation, not a gain but a transcendent loss.”
Once over, Alistair ends up lying to Mark about how good the experience has been. “He felt bad,” the narrative voice permits him to confess, “that Mark had never had the experience he’d just had, and he felt bad that he’d denied himself the experience for so long.” The lyrical beauty in this—containing the possibility that gay sex, in its final repudiation of power and politics, may prove itself a redoubtably potent leveler—encloses a lesson every generation of gay men will have the necessary burden of relearning.
