(Bloomberg Markets) — When Daniel Lefferts was an MFA student working on an early draft of his novel, Ways and Means, he would ride the subway downtown to observe a specific group of New Yorkers. “I would just walk through the Financial District and see these men coming out of the buildings and running to Sweetgreen, wearing their white button-downs and their Patagonia vests,” Lefferts tells me over lunch at a coffee shop. in Hudson, New York. “It felt beautiful and mysterious – like I was on safari.”
At the same time, Lefferts met with several men who work on Wall Street. As he would write an essay on The Paris Review, the lines between romance and fiction can blur at times, as his book takes place in the hectic and busy environment of New York's finance industry. One of the story's key moments unfolds in the repo of JPMorgan Chase & Co.—a setting not overrepresented in American arts and letters.
Lefferts' real-life researchers worked at hedge funds and private equity firms. They wore the same Barbour jackets; they held the same Wharton degrees. The differences seemed as small as the differences between cells B5 and C5 in a blank Excel spreadsheet, or units 5B and 5C in a luxury building.
Ways and Means, published in February, reaches beyond the slanderous-financier stereotype. It's filled with characters navigating New York and their worries about money. The book centers on Alistair, an undergraduate student at New York University's Stern School of Business. He has moved from his hometown of Binghamton, New York, to pursue a career in investment banking, but goes off the rails after his internship at JPMorgan sours.
He has a romantic entanglement with a slightly older and significantly wealthier male couple. They are just coming out of the cocoon of their eight-year monogamous relationship by opening up to a third person, Alistair. The issue offers a diversion, then something darker, as Alistair searches for a way to earn money to support his single mother and pay off his mounting student loans. He bumps into a shadowy billionaire who pulls Alistair into his orbit.
Ways and Means reflects how those with the most wealth can maneuver with little responsibility, and what that means for everyone else. It was set in the months before Donald Trump's 2016 victory, powered in part by the electorate class divisions. “People trusted these billionaires to grow the economy, to advance innovation, to preserve institutions,” Lefferts writes in one piece, but they were, “for all their benevolence, ultimately irresponsible to people, mysterious in their intentions, incomprehensible”.
Lefferts, 35, carefully describes each character's relationship with money. For the wealthiest characters, it's just an abstraction. Mark, the half of the couple facing Alistair, survives on a trust fund from his father, who made a fortune building a mobile home company. A hungry private equity firm wants to buy it and then squeeze every penny out of its vulnerable trailer park residents. To round out those details, which provide some of the novel's richest material, Lefferts interviewed a friend who had mixed feelings about a similar family business.
A degree removed from that kind of reality, Mark rarely stops to consider what he's spending on rent, transportation and living expenses for himself and his long-term partner, Elijah. Both Mark and Elijah embody a type familiar to every New Yorker—call it the well-fed artist—a person whose living expenses are paid by someone else so they can “focus” on writing or painting without producing anything. . For Alistair, there is no escape from the price tags imposed at every moment. On his first night out at NYU, he orders a vodka soda at a straight bar: $22.
Like Alistair, Lefferts grew up in Binghamton, which is just three hours north of Manhattan but far from the district in almost every other way. He recalls his culture shock coming to New York, realizing that Binghamton families with lake houses no longer seemed so prosperous.
The idea for the character of Alistair came to Lefferts when he was studying English at NYU. He says he's always liked stories about shady corporations and men in production. He likes movies Michael Clayton AND Margin Call. Still, he found much of the contemporary literature on finance unsatisfactory, with some notable exceptions, such as that of Joseph O'Neill Netherlands and Pulitzer Prize winner Hernan Diaz trust. Another novelist who writes diligently about the hedge fund subculture, Gary Shteyngart, muddied his book.
For Lefferts, many of the best novelistic treatments of money date from the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, by writers more comfortable invoking specifics about class division. Whole plots return the exact amount of an inheritance, a mismanaged investment or the deed of a property. As a student, he completed the work of Edith Wharton and Jane Austen.
Lefferts, who briefly considered, then rejected, the idea of attending Stern, realized he needed to know more about life in banking and investing to develop the world Alistair enters and eventually abandons for a more dubious venture.
He assigned himself some homework. He audited undergraduate economics courses at Columbia University and began reading Economist each week, going straight to articles on quantitative easing and index funds. “It was as boring as it was avant-garde,” he says.
Our check arrives. Lefferts has one more stop: his place on the road. “I have something on the wall that I think you'll like,” he says.
In Lefferts' apartment, above his desk hangs the keyboard of a Bloomberg terminal. It is framed in white, encased in glass, oriented vertically, detached from its original context by a frayed piece of wire. (A meta disclaimer: Bloomberg LP is the parent company of Bloomberg News.)
Just two hours south in Midtown Manhattan, this would be a routine, ubiquitous machine, installed on rows and rows of desks on every trading floor—but reconsidered, here, it's a work of art.
Massa covers the estate from New York.
To contact the author of this story:
Annie Massa in New York at (email protected)