Daniel Lefferts’s Book Notes novel Ways and Means is an ambitious and accomplished debut.
“Ambitious and exciting…Lefferts’s nimble sense of scale enables him to convincingly depict the blue-chip firms who rejected Alistair and exploit the housing market, then zoom in for poignant and subtle psychological realism. The results are electrifying.”
Ways and Means is a literary thriller about a gay finance student who, in his desperation to escape his Rust Belt poverty, takes a job with a shadowy billionaire. The book also follows Alistair’s lovers, an older couple with steep moral and financial problems of their own. Set in New York against the backdrop of the 2016 election, the novel examines class, politics, art, sex, and the intersections between these things during a moment of American turmoil. Given its subject, time period, setting, and tone, the book to me makes a sound very much like American pop: bright, relentless, animated by outrageous and unachievable desires, menacing. It’s the most beautiful sound I know.
“Die Young” by Kesha
My protagonist went to high school in the early 2010s, and when I was developing his character I listened to a lot of music from that period, working under the theory that the music we hear as teens molds our consciousness in a way that no other music ever can. Predictably, Kesha came up a lot—so much so that I namecheck her in the book—and this was a song I often returned to. It’s Top 40 pop at its most terrifying and sublime. How could you listen to this song at a school dance and not be deluded into thinking that your life will be glorious?
“Rich Girl” by Hall & Oates
Despite my class sympathies, in this book and in general, I find the trope of an aimless rich kid eternally interesting and deeply moving, which is probably why I wrote one such kid into my book. That character is the scion of a mobile-home fortune who once harbored literary ambitions but has since lost himself in ennui and frustrated romantic infatuation, and this song always reminds me of him. He shares the tragic situation of the girl in the lyrics. No difficulty he encounters matters, not really, because he can always rely on his father’s money. To be deprived by your wealth of genuine human drama, of risk and fear, of necessity and purpose: I find that beautiful, and unfathomably sad.
“I Feel Better” by Hot Chip
If I had to choose a song that best exemplifies the literary style I tried to cultivate in my book, it would be this one. The combination of string instruments, relentless pop beat, and rueful lyrics corresponds to a tonal juxtaposition I find particularly satisfying in fiction: high formality mixed with contemporary bluntness mixed with genuine feeling.
“Better Off Alone” by Alice Deejay
Whenever my writing isn’t going well—whenever I’m mired in a five-clause sentence or a directionless paragraph or a tortured description—I put in my headphones and seek refuge in a playlist consisting of pure musical candy: pop songs or EDM tracks with meaningless lyrics, predictable progressions, the simplest melodies imaginable. It’s my way of untangling my neurons. After a few songs my head clears and suddenly I can see how to break up that long sentence, how to reorient that paragraph around a point, how to dispatch that description quickly and cleanly. “Better Off Alone” does this more effectively than any other song: you’d be hard-pressed to find a simpler or more predictable piece of music. But it also has a propulsiveness that I like to bring into my own work, and as someone who often writes about isolated, alienated characters I find its titular lyric—repeated 10 times over the course of the song—haunting.
“Take Me Home, Country Roads” by Lana Del Rey
Even as he seeks to escape his origins, my protagonist is dogged by a perverse longing for home: for his dingy upstate city, for his mother, for his earliest self. I can think of no song that better expresses that longing than this one, and it’s particularly dear to me since in high school my friends and I listened to it on repeat in the weeks leading to graduation. The original John Denver version is untoppable, but Lana’s rendition, with its strange, almost Lynchian melancholy, comes close.