Alistair McCabe, the protagonist of Daniel Lefferts’ debut novel Ways and Means, is gay, smart, ambitious, handsome and a finance student at NYU’s Stern School of Business. He comes from a lower-working-class background in a depressed corner of upstate New York.
Alistair, burdened by huge student debt, becomes entangled in a high-risk financial scheme that involves him in a complex erotic dynamic with an older gay couple, Mark and Elijah; a Bulgarian entrepreneur, Nikolai; Jay, an “artist”; and Herve, a mysterious and dangerous billionaire.
Ways and Means has been trumpeted as a gay novel, and it is one on the surface. Its principal characters are gay men; sex between men is central to the narrative; and questions of gay male identity, desire, intimacy, friendship and sexual freedom run through the book.
But that description, accurate as it is, isn’t a sufficient introduction. Ways and Means is above all about money. It depicts a pervasive system of values in which wealth, access, status and economic power determine the possibilities available to almost everyone in the novel, except Maura, Alistair’s hardworking mother.
The Wall Street Journal, with its intrinsic emphasis on money and acquisition, seemed to recognize the true heart of the matter in its review. Other reviewers have stressed the book’s place in contemporary gay fiction.
Both observations are true. What interests me is where they meet. What happens when gay men, and artists, intellectuals, lovers and would-be entrepreneurs of every stripe, try to live freely in a culture where money has become the dominant measure of value? Freedom, desire, even liberation, the novel suggests, arrive already priced.
I did not find it an easy book to read. Several times I nearly abandoned it. I found the plotting frequently tedious, and I wondered how many times the same characters could pass through essentially the same experiences without producing significant development or enlightenment, in character or in plot.
Repetition seemed to replace narrative movement.
Joseph Conrad finally gave me a way in.
The more I thought about Ways and Means, the more it resembled Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s novel is ostensibly a journey into the interior of colonial Africa, but its deeper journey is into the interior of an idea: European civilization.
As Marlow travels farther into the colonial enterprise, he discovers that beneath its rhetoric of civilization, progress and enlightenment lies something disturbingly empty. The system commands enormous power while lacking the moral meaning it claims. It controls and destroys the people caught within it, including those who believe themselves independent actors. Lefferts’s novel can be read as a comparable journey into another kind of darkness. Alistair travels into the heart of money. The resemblance I suggest here is structural: a journey inward, toward the center of a system, to discover what actually lies there.
Money at first appears to promise freedom. It can provide security, education, mobility, pleasure and access. For someone without substantial wealth, it offers a way out of the limits imposed by class and circumstance.
Alistair’s ambitions cannot simply be dismissed as greed. Money represents possibility. But as he moves deeper into the world of wealth, another possibility comes into view: The pursuit of money does not merely provide freedom but gradually determines what freedom is allowed to mean.
The characters in Ways and Means are constantly making choices, yet they rarely seem to choose the terms under which those choices are made. They are not merely responding to money; they are reacting to it, accommodating themselves to it.
This is why I think the title deserves more attention than it has received.
“Ways and means” is an ordinary phrase for the methods by which one achieves an end. But in American political life, Ways and Means is also the name of the U.S. Congress House committee whose jurisdiction centers on taxation, revenue and other major economic matters. Lefferts’s novel is set against the 2016 presidential election and is explicitly concerned with money, class, ambition, politics and power, so the resonance is striking.
I don’t know whether Lefferts intended the congressional reference, but the title produces an extraordinary convergence of meanings: money as the means of achieving one’s desires; the methods and compromises by which those desires are pursued; and the political machinery through which economic power is organized.
The title begins to sound like a question: What are the ways, and what are the means, by which people obtain what they want? And what happens when the means become indistinguishable from the ends?
The same question helps explain the novel’s treatment of art. Elijah embodies another version of the problem: the desire to believe that art can exist independently of money. Elijah lives off Mark’s inheritance which comes from his father’s trailer park empire. Yet Elijah despises the wealth that supports him, unable to accept that art requires means: time, patrons, institutions, audiences, publicity and economic support.
Jay, the “artist” who exists for pure art, is a marvelous reduction to absurdity of that vain pretense. One of the novel’s strongest moments comes when a drag queen slaps Jay for passing out MAGA hats in gay bars in the name of ART. This slap reminds us that art exists in a political as well as economic context.
Alistair, Elijah and Jay explore different chambers of the same interior darkness. Alistair encounters the heart of money through ambition, Elijah through the pursuit of art, Jay through art as the allure of fame. Other characters meet it through inheritance, sexuality, professional aspiration, status, friendship, family and political power. Each believes he is pursuing something of his own choosing, and each is operating within a system that has already fixed the value of what he pursues.
The culture of money has entered the room before they even begin to feel and think, and it has entered the bedroom too. Another of the novel’s strongest moments comes when Elijah prepares for an orgy with various dildos, lubes and chemicals. Even desire arrives with its equipment. The deepest irony of the novel may be that its characters acquire choices while losing control over what those choices mean. The ending of the novel only intensified my disquiet about the plot.
Perhaps that irony is what Ways and Means finally shares with Heart of Darkness: both novels take their characters toward the center of a system that promises meaning and power, only to find at that center something emptier, and more powerful, than anyone imagined. In Conrad, it is the rapacious greed beneath civilization’s moral rhetoric. In Lefferts, it may be the destructive emptiness at the heart of money.
In the end it was Maura who made the reading worthwhile. When Alistair proudly showers her with money and expensive objects, she says: “But I don’t want these things.”
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Nick Patricca is professor emeritus at Loyola University Chicago, active member of the Dramatists Guild of America, member of International PEN San Miguel Centre, MX.
© 2026 nicholas.patricca@gmail.com