Banal Nightmare

A Novel

By: Halle Butler

Narrated by: Ruby McCollister

A ferocious novel by one of the boldest voices in American fiction and the author of The New Me, the “definitive work of millennial literature” (The New Yorker)

“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

Margaret Anne “Moddie” Yance had just returned to her native land in the Midwestern town of X, 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.

So begins Halle Butler’s sadistically precise and hilarious Banal Nightmare, which follows Moddie as she abruptly ends her long-term relationship and moves back to her hometown, throwing herself at the mercy of her old friends as they, all suddenly tipping toward middle age, go to parties, size each other up, obsess over past slights, dream of wild triumphs, and indulge in elaborate revenge fantasies. When her friend Pam invites a mysterious East Coast artist to take up a winter 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. As the day of reckoning approaches, friends will become enemies, enemies will become mortal enemies, and old loyalties will be tested to their extreme.

Banal Nightmare is filled with complicated characters who will dazzle you in their rendering just as often as they will infuriate you with their decisions. Halle Butler singularly captures the volatile, angry, aggrieved, surreal, and entirely disorienting atmosphere of the modern era.

Cover art: Yelling, 1994, by John Wesley. Used with permission of the estate of John Wesley. Private Collection, Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Image.

Titled correctly

This book is exactly what its title describes. Like listening to Search Party without the fun (Elliot & Portia). Excellently read and much more enjoyable as an audiobook. The ending was legitimately surprising and redeemed the book somewhat.

Butler was once asked to describe her book in three words and responded with “white blue smooth”. The first of those words accurately describes the novel.

Funny but

Funny but exhausting. Supposed to be. But the superficiality is tiresome. Probably supposed to be. Great book if you hate everyone and like it that way. But other than human failings there's no humanity at all

Everything you want in a Butler novel

What makes Halle Butler so unique is her ability to describe the "banal nightmare" of 21st century life perfectly, while superimposing upon it the stream of consciousness thoughts we all experience from moment to moment. The more she avoids "plot" the better her prose becomes.

And while I cringed when I first saw that she had ceded the book's narration to someone else for the first time – Butler doesn't just read, she performs, after all – I quickly grew to love Ruby McCollister's interpretation of the text. She clearly knows Butler's narration style and has preserved the best aspects of that, while also bringing something more to the table. An excellent collaboration.

Character’s self loathing

It was a banal nightmare with nothing interesting and too many storylines. And, an abrupt ending to boot!