In her essay On Self-Respect, Joan Didion described a lack of self-respect as “running away to find oneself and having found no one is home”. This accurately describes the titular nightmare of Halle Butler’s latest novel. Set in the present day, protagonist Margaret “Moddie” Yance finds herself back in her hometown – a Midwestern town in the US called X – after an explosive break-up. Having quit her job and cashed out her savings, Moddie’s quest is to build a new life in X while deciding how much of her old one is worth preserving.
Unfortunately, Moddie has lingering attachments: she constantly relives memories from her previous relationship that both mortify and comfort her. She keeps this from her social circle, a group of thirtysomething university administrators who Moddie regards with curiosity and condescension. Her friends slowly bring her into the fold, and Moddie joins in as they accuse each other of political incorrectness, careerism and cultural obsolescence – mostly via email.
Halle Butler is known for writing dark workplace satires: a brand of contemporary fiction that the Chicago Tribune calls “feel-bad book(s)”. Her previous novels, Jillian (2017) and The New Me (2019), won recognition for describing the humiliations of underemployment with gloomy precision. Her work explores the distressing side effects of extended adolescence through millennial characters who are low on serotonin and high on snark.
Butler’s prose style resembles a frenzied voicemail message: conversational and brisk. An ex-boyfriend is described as having a “rotten brain” and opinions that are “inherited, none of them spontaneous, completely rotten”. The writing’s urgency highlights Moddie’s angst, but Butler often pads sentences with generalities (“gaping void of loneliness”) instead of specifics (“Cialis jazz”).
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Across her body of work, Butler’s scepticism spares few institutions. Banal Nightmare is no exception to this rule: Facebook is described as “the number one worldwide distributor of child pornography”. Even formalised story structure is branded as “incredibly spiritually limiting”.
Perhaps this is why Banal Nightmare’s final turn feels out of place. In the end, Moddie faces a moment that forces her to question her deeply held beliefs. In doing so, she’s afforded a newfound sense of self-respect, but readers who share Butler’s trademark cynicism might wonder if it came at too low a cost.
