Banal Nightmare
A Novel
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3.6 • 10 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A “vividly, chillingly current” (The Washington Post) novel by the author of The New Me, one of the boldest voices in American fiction
“[Halle Butler's] talent lies in depicting how these sore winners think, and the quiet madness that comes from measuring every interaction in your life by what might be gained in power and status. . . . [Banal Nightmare is] her most accomplished novel." —The New York Review of Books
“So funny, so smart, utterly vicious—just brilliant.”—Zadie Smith
“Butler has crafted a novel in which every character proves to be completely, uniquely crazy. Her perverse sense of humor should be studied and celebrated.”—David Sedaris
A NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
In a Midwestern college town at the height of the Me Too era, a group of simultaneously self-flagellating and self-aggrandizing pseudo-academics sit around, think, and send one another insulting emails. As the impulses and memories they have barely managed to repress begin to surface, their relationships become increasingly deranged. Banal Nightmare captures the volatile, surreal, and entirely disorienting atmosphere of the modern 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.
