While reading Halle Butler’s new novel, “Banal Nightmare” I almost felt like I was being held hostage by the book.
Is this a good thing? Read on, friends.
“Banal Nightmare” is Butler’s third novel following 2015’s “Jillian” — described admiringly as “the feel-bad book of the year” in this newspaper — and 2019’s “The New Me.” Butler is considered one of those writers who is most tapped into illuminating the lives and minds of the millennial generation. She’s America’s answer to the UK’s Sally Rooney.
As an officially very middle-aged person, I now pick up a millennial novel out of a sense of curiosity, a desire to better understand where a generation that has come of age in a world different from the one I grew up in is coming from. It’s the inverse of how I was reading John Updike’s and Philip Roth’s novels of middle-aged angst when I was a teenager.
I’ve got enough middle-aged angst rattling around my skull now, thank you very much. I don’t need it in my fiction.
“Banal Nightmare” is loosely centered on the character of Moddie, a mostly failing artist who has retreated from her life in Chicago back to the regional college campus town she grew up in, following the break-up of a long, increasingly dysfunctional relationship.
Moddie is unmoored, haunted by the failed relationship, and another disturbing encounter that lurks through the first two-thirds of the book, until it is revealed in a truly stunning set piece that I will not spoil for readers. Moddie lives in a grim apartment, has no work to occupy herself and mostly flails as she tries to reconnect with her high school friends.
But while Moddie is at the center, we also spend significant time with other characters, Pam, a college arts administrator who has invited a visiting artist to campus for the semester and wonders if the artist is a way out of the town and the relationship she finds both emotionally slack and totally suffocating.
There is the artist, David, well beyond his past successes, and who has no idea how he wound up in such a place. Kimberly, a wannabe writer in Moddie’s circle is deeply envious of another character’s short essay published in The New York Times, but rather than writing, she spends her time making a proof-of-concept website if she were to become a writer at the level she’s certain she deserves.
At times, the way Butler mines the interiors of her good-sized cast of characters — those mentioned above and others — all of whom are seemingly possessed by a combination of towering self-regard and pervasive self-loathing, felt almost oppressive. These are deeply alienated people, bottomless wells of wanting who have no specific idea of what might fulfill their desires.
But even as I felt like I was drowning in misery, I was captured by Butler’s deft wit, particularly her way of illuminating the way performative online culture has seeped into the lives of these people. These characters literally don’t know how to live.
On the other hand, who does? Butler is often lacerating to her creations, showing them up as fools, but I also began to wonder if being foolish is simply the default mode for being human. Spending time close to these people was not pleasant, but it was fascinating and utterly absorbing.
“Banal Nightmare” is really the perfect title for this book. These lives seem utterly banal, devoid of meaning, but that lack of meaning is truly the stuff of nightmares.
And when there are glimmers of waking from the nightmare, as happens to Moddie late in the book, something unexpected shines through.
A truly fascinating reading experience.
John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”
Book recommendations from the Biblioracle
John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read.
1. “The Ride of Her Life: The True Story of a Woman, Her Horse, and Their Last-Chance Journey Across America” by Elizabeth Letts2. “The Nature of Fragile Things” by Susan Meissner3. “Horse” by Geraldine Brooks4. “The Good Left Undone” by Adriana Trigiani
— Dee H., Fontana, Wisconsin (on behalf of her book club, which has only read four books this season)
Dee specifically asked for books set in the Midwest of Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota, which makes things actually kind of easy because I’m recommending the great bard of the region, Jon Hassler’s “Dear James.”
1. “The Book of Delights” by Ross Gay2. “What It Takes to Heal” by Prentis Hemphill3. “Living Buddha, Living Christ” by Thich Nhat Hanh4. “The Price You Pay” by Nick Petrie5. “Every Sinner Bleeds” by S.A. Cosby
— Joanne L., Chicago
I’m going to lean into Joanne’s penchant for thriller/crime and recommend the classic, “A Simple Plan” by Scott Smith.
1. “Camino Ghosts” by John Grisham2. “The Furies” by John Connolly3. “Wandering Stars” by Tommy Orange4. “I Am Pilgrim” by Terry Hayes5. “Calamity of Souls” by David Baldacci
— Dave S., Merrillville, Indiana
I recently turned a friend of mine on to John Sandford’s “Prey” series, and Dave looks like a good candidate for it too. I’ll go with “Phantom Prey” the 18th in the series, which need not be read in order or to completion.
