Halle Butler is one of the funniest and most exacting novelists of millennial precarity. In her first two novels, 2015’s Jillian and 2019’s The New Me, she showed an extraordinarily sensitive eye for emotional and economic vulnerabilities. The protagonists, Megan (24) and Millie (30), feel complex disdain for themselves, their unfulfilling jobs, their irritating older colleagues, as they maintain an anxiously agreeable veneer. Their efforts at work are not rewarded with professional advancement. Their punishing self-awareness does not make them any happier than the people whose lives they scorn – people such as Jillian, a mantra-reciting single parent in her mid-30s.
Other gifted novelists of Butler’s generation, such as Patricia Lockwood, Ben Lerner and Sally Rooney, have leaned away from irony towards sincerity as they have travelled through their 30s and beyond. With her third novel, Butler moves definitively in the other direction. Her central character, Moddie, is Jillian’s age, but begins the novel having thrown off all the obligations she can. She has broken up with her artist boyfriend, Nick, after a brief fling with a colleague who “told her she had movie boobs”. She has left her potentially fulfilling job as a grant writer for a Chicago arts charity, and moved to X, the university town where she grew up.
When a mysterious older visiting artist arrives in X, Moddie’s rediscovered friends, now working with varying degrees of self-satisfied angst at the university, are brought together for awkward chat. Banal Nightmare is worth reading just to experience Butler’s virtuosic prose, a high-wire combination of deadpan summary (“They sat on the couch for about an hour, going over current events and personal experiences”) and hyper-articulate observation (“The building’s entrance looked like vagina dentata and the lobby looked like if a German Expressionist set designer had used the inside of a Norelco razor as inspiration for a new opera where all the characters were maybe supposed to be Hitler”).
At social gatherings, Moddie gets drunk and goes off topic – expressing distaste for NPR; criticising Ruth Bader Ginsburg – which leads to a general consensus that she is “crazy”. This dynamic of a protagonist’s mild disobedience eliciting over-zealous opprobrium from those around them is familiar from much autofiction and what has been called the “sad girl” trope. In its early scenes, Banal Nightmare appears to set up a familiar dynamic, pitting Moddie’s urbane self-awareness against the fearful raised eyebrows of the suburban middlebrow crowd.
Then the novel makes things more complicated. We learn that Moddie has recently been the victim of predatory behaviour from a man she considered a friend. Butler’s measured description of that event is more sober and quietly affecting than anything in Jillian or The New Me. For the first time, one of Butler’s characters manages to be straightforwardly honest about their feelings, as Moddie tells her friend Bethany what happened. Bethany is in a position of power at the university, where there are vacancies after a sexual abuse scandal, and offers Moddie a job. Moddie calls her mum to report that she “was no longer a liar, a reject, or a fuckup, and had finally been accepted into the bosom of sisterhood”.
Banal Nightmare roams more freely between characters than Butler’s previous books. The excruciating private fantasies of peripheral figures provide some of its most memorable moments. A biology professor, Craig, dreams about sex with his intern. A literature professor, Peter, gets high and fantasises about giving a lecture on the fascist origins of Hollywood narrative structure, his students “cheering and lifting him on a chair and carrying him out on to the quad”. The most airless, sexless character, Kimberly, fantasises about writing an amusingly terrible lyric essay in response to the arrival of Moddie, “a privileged interloping bitch who was being handed Kim’s spot in game night, just like she’d been handed everything else”.
Towards the end of the book, an email from Moddie’s father reveals something significant about her finances, casting her move to X in a different light. 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. The final twist is that ridiculous, chippy Kimberly, with her insufferable sincerity, may actually have a point.
• Banal Nightmare by Halle Butler is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
