Margaret Anne ("Moddie") Yance had just returned to her native land in the Midwestern town of X, to mingle with the friends of her youth, to get back in touch with her roots, and to recover from a stressful decade of living in the city in a small apartment with a man she now believed to be a megalomaniac or perhaps a covert narcissist." So begins Banal Nightmare, Halle Butler's tour de force that follows Moddie as she throws herself at the mercy of her old friends who never left their hometown. Friends who all seemingly work at the local liberal arts college, who are all suddenly tipping toward middle age, going to parties, sizing each other up, obsessing over past slights, and dreaming of wild triumphs couched in elaborate revenge fantasies. When her friend Pam invites a mysterious New York artist to take up a winter residency in town, Moddie has no choice but to confront a trauma from her past and grapple with the reality of what her life has become. As the day of reckoning approaches, friends will become enemies, enemies will become mortal enemies, and the bonds forged in childhood will be tested to their extreme.
There are some novels so searingly precise in their ability to capture a certain moment or experience that you have to stop every few pages to send another perfect quote to your group chat. Halle Butler’s latest, Banal Nightmare, is one such book ... Will have many millennials intently nodding along to Butler’s clever insights. While not necessarily the first in the category of the millennial midlife novel, Banal Nightmare may be one of the most essential.
Ambitious ... Butler pushes her darkly humorous, mean-spirited worldview to its limits ... There’s cringeworthy, sometimes triggering material in Banal Nightmare, but it is also quite funny.
The true object of Butler’s sophisticated, ambivalent satire may be millennial fiction’s tendency to celebrate the liberatory potential of sincere self-narration and downplay economic advantage.
