Relentless Momentum: Daniel Lefferts in conversation with Joe Prendergast

Daniel Lefferts is a writer based in New York City. His debut novel, Ways and Means, was published by Abrams in 2024. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in GQ, the Yale Review, and the Baffler. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and teaches at Columbia and Rutgers University. I talked to him over email to ask him about two of his short stories, ‘Terms and Conditions’ (Yale Review) and ‘Jack in the Country’ (Baffler).

Joe Prendergast

1.

The narrator of your story ‘Terms and Conditions’ refers at one point to the ‘degradations of our era’ from which he and his circle of wealthy gay friends are eventually unable to ‘detach’ themselves. This notion of being inextricably tied to and in some way stained by the present politico-historical moment is a strong one across your writing. There’s something dirty and disagreeable about politics in your fiction, where existence in the present moment as a U.S. citizen appears as a problem to be solved either through abstention from modern life (as in Peter’s case, who believes ‘we live an irreparably fallen world’) or through ‘embracing’ vice ‘freely’, and moving through the modern world, as Andrew does, ‘like a bludgeon’, enduring and enacting ‘violations’ on the people around him. Can you tell me a bit more about this ugliness of politics as it appears in your writing?

I think something that makes our moment in the US particularly ugly is our feeling, accurate or otherwise, that we simply can’t do anything about it. We’ve lost faith in the idea that we can simply vote our way out of our political reality or that we can stand up in any meaningful sense to the cultural and technological forces bearing down on us. And I think that feeling of powerlessness breeds a certain selfishness and cynicism. If we can’t build a better society we have only so many choices, one of which is to retreat from the world (into pious purity, or willful ignorance, or Luddism, or dissociative irony) and another of which is to adapt to that world’s brutal logic—achieve success on its terms, get our “bag,” enjoy ourselves while we can and in the diminished ways that we can. My characters operate within this limited set of choices, but they can also sense the absurdity of those limits, and they can feel themselves straining against them—that’s part of the pathos and part of the comedy.

2.

A lot of your characters are described as monstrous. Looking at a picture of his ex’s new fiancé, Neil thinks: ‘Monster.’ Later, after ‘Jack in the Country’s’ series of scatological and vehicular misadventures, Neil catches himself in the mirror at a party: ‘I was a monster. I had twigs in my hair…’. And, for his part, Andrew in ‘Terms and Conditions’ is pretty grotesque, not least in the final scene in which, smeared with his own blood, he ‘laughs wildly’ at our imperilled narrator. What does the monstrous physicality of characters like Andrew help you to do with your fiction?

One of my major indirect influences is the director David Lynch—I say indirect because I would never call my work Lynchian. But Lynch’s attention to the monstrous has always resonated deeply with me. He was interested in the grotesqueries lurking beneath idealized worlds. His worlds were white-picket-fence America and Hollywood, and my world, at least in most of what I’ve written so far, is the world of managerial-class gay men. A lot of these men—not all, but a lot of them—strive for perfection in almost everything: their finances, their physiques, their domiciles, their clothes. There’s something fearsome and uncanny in their pursuit of perfection, and there’s something violent in it too. They can be cruel to each other and to themselves; they compete with each other in ways that mix uneasily with their sexual habits and appetites. I like to create moments in which the monstrosity of my characters breaks through and despoils the immaculate, artificial surfaces they try so furiously to maintain. And because the body is the site of so much of their perfectionism, a monstrosity of the body feels especially dramatic and compelling, whether it comes in the form of blood or shit. My intention in creating such moments isn’t to deflate my characters or poke fun at them but rather to grant them a wholeness. Underneath their carefully constructed beauty is a deeper, more volatile beauty, one that makes room for the grotesque.

3.

Most of your fiction takes place in New York, where you live and work, and seems to belong to an urban tradition of writing about gay men. Yet, I was struck when reading ‘Jack in the Country’ by your evocation of gay culture’s incursions into the pastoral mode, as the story’s Will and Patrick move out of the city to lay claim to a farmhouse in the Hudson Valley. Neil, the story’s narrator, wonders ‘what this pastoral landscape would have to say about its increasing monopolisation by city gays, with their Delta SkyMiles and synthetic lubricants.’ What made you interested in writing about ‘city gays’ in the country?

You’re reminding me with that quote that I’ve now mentioned Delta SkyMiles in two different stories—I think two may be enough…

“Jack in the Country” came out of the three years I spent living in New York’s Hudson Valley, when I decided to take a break from the city. I knew beforehand that there were plenty of gay men in the area, but when I arrived I was really stunned by the level of infiltration (an infiltration, of course, of which I was part). And I was alternately amused, fascinated, and a little unnerved by the subculture they’d created there. Interminable peacocking about home renovations, pool parties backdropped by farmlands rather than beaches, fierce competitions played out on country lanes rather than in Hell’s Kitchen, etc. I felt they’d reestablished the same codes and expectations they lived by in the city, except now with a pastoral spin, and I wanted to write about that.

4.

One element of ‘Terms and Conditions’ that stood out to me as particularly poignant was the narrator’s sense that he has no choice but to continue ‘keeping pace’ with this group of, frankly, pretty awful people. Good times with former girlfriends, now all ‘pregnant’ and/or ‘married’ in the suburbs, seem to represent a prelapsarian world now inaccessible. What propelled you to write about social dynamics between gay men and women and gays and other gays?

I think gay men, as they enter their thirties, can find it difficult to maintain steady, intimate friendships with the heterosexual people in their lives. Their paths and motivations begin to diverge. They might not be interested in getting married, or having children, or buying a house with a yard, or at least not in doing these things in the same way as their straight friends. You start to see a gradual realignment along the lines of sexual preference and lifestyle, a rigidification of group dynamics and trajectories. I wanted to write about someone who’s arrived at that turning point. The narrator has glommed onto this new group of friends because they model the kind of life he thinks he should lead, now that the life he led in his twenties is over. But he also finds their way of life, centered as it is on hypermasculine one-upmanship, to be alienating. He misses his old girl friends, who didn’t care that he didn’t have a six-pack and would never have called him a “beta.” But I think it’s worth noting that the narrator has blind spots. This new group of friends is certainly not the only model for early-middle-age homosexuality. And while the narrator thinks he misses his girl friends what he really misses, I think, is his youth. From his standpoint, those girl friends might seem to be living happier, more wholesome lives, but suburban parenthood has a viciousness of its own. They surely miss their twenties just as much.

5.

Reading your work, I wanted to discuss what I identified as an interest in figures and points-based systems. In ‘Terms and Conditions’, Andrew is smugly satisfied by his accumulation of Delta Airlines SkyMiles, tokens which facilitate travel and social ascension. The SkyMiles system has analogues in your characters’ assessments of one another based on salaries, property, and the all-important body count: ‘He’d slept with five hundred people…I looked back at him in terror.’ Can you talk to me a bit more about the modes of accumulation in your fiction?

A phrase that gets thrown around to describe our emerging post-rules-based geopolitical order is “might is right,” and I think that idea seeps down into the psychologies of my characters and manifests in their everyday lives. They live in a world in which there are very few if any agreed-upon moral values, and what fills that moral vacuum is a barren principle of domination and accumulation. Having more money, more sexual partners, more muscles than the people around them can feel like the only way to ensure that their lives have meaning and that, on their deathbeds, they’ll be able to look back and say that their time on earth was worthwhile. I find that approach to life very sad, of course, but I also find it entertaining, and it’s satisfying to create a sentence-level rhythm—a pulsing, percussive, relentless momentum—that formalizes that psychology on the page. I guess that’s where I find my meaning.

6.

Finally, what are you reading or watching at the moment?

The 30th-anniversary propaganda around Infinite Jest totally worked on me, and now, after an attempt in my early 20s that didn’t go very far, I’m finally tackling it. As of this writing I’m a little over halfway through. It’s stupendous, a real pinnacle of the American novel, or really the novel anywhere—but it feels very American. Like Lynch, Wallace was deeply attuned to this country’s monstrosities and grotesqueries, its peculiar Manicheanisms of hygiene and filth, satiation and self-denial, ambition and self-destruction. It contains some of the most sublimely beautiful and nightmarishly gruesome writing I’ve ever read. I’m having a blast.

Illustration by John Brooks.