Banal Nightmare
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 16 Jul 2024
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- £11.99
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- Pre-Order
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
'Halle Butler is a first-rate satirist of the horror show being sold to us as Modern Femininity. She is Thomas Bernhard in a bad mood, wearing ill-fitting tights, scrutinizing old take-out leftovers' CATHERINE LACEY
A breakup. A college town. A group of jealous friends, tipping towards middle age. They go to parties, size each other up. At night, they obsess over past slights, dream of wild triumphs and indulge in elaborate revenge fantasies, all while imagining themselves at the beating heart of various political causes.
The cast of BANAL NIGHTMARE find themselves revolving around the same questions - the choice between freedom and defeat, ambition and humility, and the need to 'speak their truth' and the tendency to slip into brazenly confrontational behaviour.
In this brilliant, hilariously perceptive, and sadistically precise new satire, Halle Butler writes our reality askance, turning a keen eye to the so-called "stability" found in adulthood milestones. In doing so, she once again captures the volatile, angry, surreal, aggrieved, and entirely disorienting atmosphere of our current era.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Butler's cutting latest (after The New Me), an aimless young woman leaves Chicago for the Midwestern university town where she grew up. Fleeing her toxic boyfriend, Nick, and a city she's come to see as an "enervating wasteland of superficial friendships with people I did not respect," Moddie plans to reconnect with her high school friends and make new ones, but she frequently alienates people with her unfiltered speech and strong opinions (her criticisms of "tedious" celebrity interviews on NPR cause her friend Pam to look at Moddie as if she were "incoherently ranting about the CIA"). The men in the novel—other characters' partners and an artist who claims he invented New Media, whom Moddie humiliates during a game of air hockey—are for the most part cartoonishly vile. There are tender moments, too, as Moddie opens up to Pam about Nick's emotional abuse and her failures as an artist. For all of Moddie's anarchic energies, her character arc feels conventional, though it serves as a vehicle for Butler's laser-sighted satire of millennial conformity. This sharply funny novel pulls no punches.
