Private Lives Beneath Wall Street Glitz Are Revealed in a New Book
A novelist does real-world research for his debut, Ways and Means.
Author Daniel Lefferts in Hudson, New York.
Photographer: Axel Dupeux for Bloomberg Markets
When Daniel Lefferts was an MFA student working on an early draft of his novel, Ways and Means, he’d ride the subway downtown to observe a specific cohort of New Yorkers. “I would just walk around the Financial District and watch these men stream out of buildings and race to Sweetgreen, wearing their white button-downs and their Patagonia vests,” Lefferts tells me over lunch in a Hudson, New York, cafe. “I found it beautiful and mysterious—like I was on a safari.”
Around the same time, Lefferts dated some men who work on Wall Street. As he’d write in an essay for the Paris Review, the lines between romance and fiction could occasionally blur, since his book takes place in the striving, charged environment of New York’s finance industry. One of the story’s pivotal moments unfolds on the repo desk of JPMorgan Chase & Co.—hardly an overrepresented setting in American arts and letters.