Banal Nightmare: A Novel | Halle Butler

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 Butlersingularly captures the volatile, angry, aggrieved, surreal, and entirely disorienting atmosphere of the modern era.

About the Author

Halle Butler’s first novel, Jillian, was called the “feel-bad book of the year” by the Chicago Tribune. Her second novel, The New Me, was named a Best Book of the Decade by Vox and a Best Book of the Year by Vanity Fair, Vulture, the Chicago Tribune, Mashable, Bustle, and NPR, and the New Yorker called it a “definitive work of millennial literature.” She was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree.