While reading Halle Butler’s new novel, “Banal Nightmare” I almost felt like I was being held hostage by the book. Is this a good thing? Read on, friends. “Banal Nightmare” is Butler’s third novel following 2015’s “Jillian” — described admiringly as “the feel-bad book of the year” in this newspaper — and 2019’s “The New Me.
” Butler is considered one of those writers who is most tapped into illuminating the lives and minds of the millennial generation. She’s America’s answer to the UK’s Sally Rooney. As an officially very middle-aged person, I now pick up a millennial novel out of a sense of curiosity, a desire to better understand where a generation that has come of age in a world different from the one I grew up in is coming from.
It’s the inverse of how I was reading John Updike’s and Philip Roth’s novels of middle-aged angst when I was a teenager. I’ve got enough middle-aged angst rattling around my skull now, thank you very much. I don’t need it in my fiction.
“Banal Nightmare” is loosely centered on the character of Moddie, a mostly failing artist who has retreated from her life in Chicago back to the regional college campus town she grew up in, following the break-up of a long, increasingly dysfunctional relationship. Moddie is unmoored, haunted by the failed relationship, and another disturbing encounter that lurks through the first two-thirds of the book, until it is revealed in a truly stunning set piece that I will.