Banal Nightmare

(by Halle Butler)

Banal Nightmare is a darkly funny novel about midlife millennial midwestern angst, and I simultaneously enjoyed it and found myself having to take breaks from it, because it’s kind of a lot of cynicism and malaise. At the start of the book, one character, Moddie, has recently broken up with her boyfriend of ten years and moved from Chicago back to her unnamed college-town hometown. Her parents have moved away, but several people from her high school friend group are still there, working at the university; part of what Moddie has to figure out (along with what to do with herself in general) is how she fits in with these people’s social scene, which is more provincial than what she’s used to (though it’s not like she particularly liked her friend group in Chicago, either). As the book progresses we learn more about Moddie’s discontents (and traumas), and more about everyone else’s discontents, too. Every couple we see in this book is unhappy in their own way, and multiple characters, not just Moddie, have been through messy breakups recently. From the outside, some characters look like they have their shit together, in contrast to Moddie’s more overt unhingedness—but in fact, everyone has their delusions and resentments and insecurities and grudges. (It seems like almost no one is entirely content with where they’ve ended up—with the semi-exception of the department chair, Bethany. But Bethany’s happiness seems a little too dependent on gossip and social intrigue and her position at the top of the social hierarchy. And is even she really at the top of the social hierarchy when her friends (whose boss she ultimately is) come to game night at her place because they feel obligated to?)

The novel uses parties and social gatherings to show how isolated and self-centered and inane people can be, and the party scenes are some of my favorite parts of this book: they are generally really funny and the tone is perfect. Elsewhere, I sometimes felt my attention wander as the narrative’s perspective shifted from character to character—though there were moments when I thought that worked really well, like when the focus briefly switches from characters we’ve been following to other people in the town before coming back to the characters we know: everyone is inside their own heads too much, everyone is muddling through.