Banal Nightmare
Halle Butler
Banal Nightmare
Halle Butler
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.
Review
Aurelia Orr
After a decade of dating a man she now knows is a megalomaniac, Margaret (‘Moddie’) Yance moves back to her hometown to reconnect with old ‘friends’ and forget the number of years she wasted on her narcissistic boyfriend. She was also cheating on him with her work colleague, Toby, but she doesn’t want to think about that, either.
It turns out, all of Moddie’s friends are hating life as much as she is. They go out and party like they used to when they were younger, hoping to reverse history and pretend to lead lives where they didn’t stay with men they didn’t love, or have children that demand every second of their lives, or were more confident to seek sexual satisfaction. In the midst of their petty rivalries, Moddie must confront her demons and grapple with who she has become.
Halle Butler’s witty, cruel and crass writing echoes the characters’ dark and sexually deviant thoughts as they obsess over each other, tear each other down for a slice of self-worth, and fantasise about plots of revenge. Banal Nightmare is a dark comedy dissecting what the world would be like if we released our deepest frustrations rather than left them pent up inside, and how human interactions would drastically change if every word we said was the bitter truth of what we thought about one another. The omniscient narrator allows us to delve deep into the crevices of each character’s mind, as you discover new and creative ways of deeply disliking, but nevertheless being compelled by, these hateful and unreliable characters. Perhaps the bleakest book about life in your 30s you will ever read, this is perfect for fans of Lisa Taddeo or Ottessa Moshfegh, or for anyone who loves reading about unlikeable characters. It is certain you will be left haunted and unsettled by the end. Not
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