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‘So funny, so smart, utterly vicious – just brilliant’ ZADIE SMITH
‘Butler’s sense of humour should be studied and celebrated’ DAVID SEDARIS
‘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
‘The voice of a (tired, furious, disappointed, disoriented) generation’ LITHUB
Margaret Anne (‘Moddie’) Yance has just returned to her hometown, to mingle with the friends of her youth, to get back in touch with her roots, and to recover from a stressful decade of living in the city in a small apartment with a man she now believed to be a megalomaniac or perhaps a covert narcissist.
Back home, Moddie throws herself at the mercy of her old friends, all suddenly tipping toward middle age. She joins them as they go to parties, size each other up, obsess over past slights, dream of wild triumphs, and indulge in elaborate revenge fantasies.
But when a mysterious artist arrives in town to take up a residency at the local university, Moddie has no choice but to confront the demons of her past and grapple with the reality of what her life has become.
The inimitable Halle Butler, author of The New Me, returns with a novel that is sadistically precise, completely singular and horribly funny
‘Butler’s sense of humour should be studied and celebrated’ DAVID SEDARIS
‘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
‘The voice of a (tired, furious, disappointed, disoriented) generation’ LITHUB
Margaret Anne (‘Moddie’) Yance has just returned to her hometown, to mingle with the friends of her youth, to get back in touch with her roots, and to recover from a stressful decade of living in the city in a small apartment with a man she now believed to be a megalomaniac or perhaps a covert narcissist.
Back home, Moddie throws herself at the mercy of her old friends, all suddenly tipping toward middle age. She joins them as they go to parties, size each other up, obsess over past slights, dream of wild triumphs, and indulge in elaborate revenge fantasies.
But when a mysterious artist arrives in town to take up a residency at the local university, Moddie has no choice but to confront the demons of her past and grapple with the reality of what her life has become.
The inimitable Halle Butler, author of The New Me, returns with a novel that is sadistically precise, completely singular and horribly funny
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Reviews
Butler has crafted a novel in which every character proves to be completely, uniquely crazy. Her sense of humour should be studied and celebrated
Halle Butler's Banal Nightmare is a masterpiece, her best book yet. It burns with a wild, unforgiving fire, making most other novels seem vague and ho-hum in comparison. This novel exhibits an eerily spot-on understanding of the private mind as it delves deep into an array of lives, revealing harrowing experiences of loneliness, love, heartbreak, abuse, malaise, depression, obsession, hatred, and revenge. No feeling is skipped over. No thought is simplified. No idea is dumbed down. Like a knife dancing through air, it's a manic, nerve-wracking read, painful and so weirdly funny. I felt gripped by it from beginning to end ... an unapologetic, totally original, modern marvel
Oh man, this book! Halle Butler's new novel is a blistering assault on contemporary pieties about art and love, an epic Woolfian tapestry of perfect comic rants, terrifying panic attacks, and, most gratifying of all, sincere attempts at human connection. This is the best, most ambitious book yet by one of my favourite writers
'In Halle Butler's world, everyone hates each other, every day is excruciating in its mundanity, every thought is the beginning of an Escherian journey round and round in hell, and somehow the whole thing is unbelievably funny. With the force of an episode of marijuana psychosis and the extreme detail of a hyperrealistic work of art, Banal Nightmare attempts transcendence through anxiety and dissociation, nailing a series of contemporary characters - better pray you're not one of them - to the wall
So funny, so smart, utterly vicious
Butler writes with a bee-sting-sharp sense of humor and irony, and nothing is sacred, not Hillary Clinton, not Ruth Bader Ginsburg, not Christine Blasey Ford's testimony before Congress. What's most surprising is that this cooler-than-the-cool-kids novel actually has an emotional center that will make your pulse race. . . . A tart, irreverent rant of a novel that takes a sharp turn toward something more serious
Brilliantly observed and unsparing, Banal Nightmare is an intense, exhilarating, often-hilarious kaleidoscopic inquiry into contemporary relationships. With the comprehensive social gaze of Balzac and the cold logic of Renata Adler, Halle Butler conjures a latticework structure of life, rage, dark humor, and incalculable grace