Halle Butler’s “Banal Nightmare” is the Feel Bad Novel of the Year

Halle Butler, author of Jillian and The New Me, returns with a darkly humorous and brutally honest portrayal of the millennial ethos. Banal Nightmare centers around a character named Moddie, who moves back to her Midwestern hometown from Chicago after the end of a toxic relationship. Reconnecting with her old friends from high school, Moddie finds herself amidst a web of social gatherings, simmering resentments, and pervasive disillusionment. Her return is marked by a series of confrontations with her past, making clear how a re-evaluation of exploitative sexual interactions has impacted her.  

Switching rapidly between points of view, Banal Nightmare follows an extensive group of minor characters who devolve into behaving with increased bizarreness and desperation. Sharp and incisive, Butler’s writing shines as she satirizes the absurdities of modern life, such as in a series of monologues laced with corporatized vocabularies and therapized non-speak. Her third novel is less organized around a plot and more a series of set pieces that communicate thematic ruminations on the often grotesque and humorous realities of interpersonal relationships, the extent to which we shape our identities in reaction to our social environments, and the disorienting nature of contemporary life. 

Butler and I spoke over email earlier this spring. We discussed social paranoia, the fallacy of careerism, and how the obscure can serve a narrative. 

Marisa Wright: I’ll start with the book’s title. It suggests a juxtaposition of the mundane and the unsettling, which I think captures the ethos of all three of your novels. What draws you to that intersection? 

HB: There’s a scene in Banal Nightmare where Moddie sends an email to an acquaintance along the lines of “Hey, good to see you the other day, let’s get lunch soon.” It’s absolutely normal, routine, almost boring, but Moddie sends the email in the middle of an operatic, psychotic revenge and anger monologue, and in the context of the novel and that scene, we understand this very normal thing, the email, as this dark, almost poisonous thing full of confusing and unconsciously hesitant malicious intent. I’m drawn to this because I find it funny. It is a little ridiculous. It’s paranoid, it’s over the top, it’s a comment on, and a joke about, the hidden intentions of social pleasantries. But then if I turn it the other way, or view it in context with other scenes, I find it very sad, or turn it another way, it’s disturbing. I like moments that feel like they contain the potential for several different emotional responses at once. I find working in simultaneous and contradictory, or semi-contradictory, states to be very stimulating.

MW: This book includes a wider cast of characters than your first two novels. Did the characters or the themes explored in the book come to you first? 

HB: I wanted to spend time thinking about repetition, repeated patterns among couples and friends, repeated fixations about professional and personal jealousy, and I wanted to show this not just inside one person but repeated across a whole social net. Many times throughout the book, I thought about the town as a social organism, or even sometimes that the characters were nightmare anxiety manifestations of Moddie’s. Though, I think that what I tell myself to keep writing is not always what I end up “meaning”—which is just to say, I don’t think the book is a dream, though it does exist in a more bizarre level of reality than the first two novels. But these are more bizarre times, so that makes sense. 

One throughline is professional jealousy and ambition. It’s something nearly every character thinks about at least once in the book. On the extreme end, we have Kimberly, who is the most cartoonishly obsessed with these things, then Pam, Moddie, David, all representing different expressions of the same set of questions: am I getting what I want? Does someone else have the thing I should have? Should I try harder? And with a bigger cast, I can explore these questions from different angles, different depths of satire and sympathy. Many things that come up in the book once come up a few times, in different arrangements.

MW: You’ve previously discussed including elements of your own life in your novels, and several details indicate the town referred to as “X” in the book as East Lansing, MI, where you went to high school. Obscuring in that way is not something you’ve done in previous work. Why do so now? 

HB: “X” felt sort of 19th century to me in a way that I found inspiring. I was reading a ton of Balzac while I wrote this book, and was trying to view the characters and scenarios, which were firmly rooted in 2018, from a different angle—both the angle of a few years hindsight, and the angle of the 19th century. Which social conventions have been inverted, which have stayed the same, and so on. This could be any Midwestern college town. I didn’t want to pick one at random or make up a name. For me, the town exists in an almost dream place, simultaneously vivid and inaccessible, real, and imaginary.

This novel does have many things that are obscured and then revealed, and I was thinking about repression and suppression—what do the characters know and not know about themselves and each other—and there are things in the landscape that are obscured and revealed, too. There’s a coffee shop in the book that used to have a racist name, Moddie finds an Iron Cross sticker on her neighbor’s mailbox. Do we see the past, or do we see the future? How do things flicker in and out of focus? Which reality are we living in? That’s how I was thinking about the obscure, more in the context of the confusion and uncertainty of the characters.

MW: Your writing style of switching frequently and quickly to different characters’ points of view is striking. Where does that come from? Why do you think it’s a style you’ve returned to in your fiction? 

HB: I know it’s not unique to me. I believe there’s a lot of this movement in To the Lighthouse, and there’s also that amazing scene in the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire that weaves in and out of different characters’ inner monologues. I could go on. That kind of freedom is exciting to me, to be able to choose when to wonder what a character is thinking and when to learn, and how you can use this for different effects. A lot of my characters are socially paranoid, so I like to switch to show how close or how far off their assumptions are. It feels like a way to play with perspective, humor, and trust.

MW: Your first two books largely center around workplaces, but the workplace is much more in the background even as wealth, professional jealousy, and class tension are at the fore in this novel. Can you talk about how work and class operate in this book? Do you think it’s different than in your previous books? 

HB: I don’t know if I think that class tension is at the fore in this novel, as all of these characters are middle-class straight white people working at the same university and living in the same town, and they more or less all grew up together under similar economic and social circumstances. It is a very homogenous group. But jealousy is definitely present, and maybe a false perception of class tension.

The character Kimberly is very convinced that she’s embroiled in some kind of class conflict with Moddie. Kimberly wants to be class conscious or maybe wants to be perceived that way, and there are many times when she gives lip service to supporting vulnerable social groups, but usually in a way that loops back to benefit her own ambitions, and she often tacks herself onto the end of the list of people who should be considered vulnerable. When she’s angry with Moddie when she says she feels “triggered” by Moddie’s privilege, she uses the language of meritocracy—I worked for what I have, so I deserve it, unlike Moddie. This is the kind of language used by people who the system works for and is often used to deny the existence of systemic racism. I think this contradiction in her thinking is still very unconscious. She oscillates between claiming victimhood and bragging about her achievements and status as an Ivy League educated, married, well-employed homeowner. There’s something about this identity, I think, that unnerves Kimberly, so she swings back from bragging to claiming that she’s under attack, and when she feels under attack, she then attacks through self-aggrandizement. I’m very interested in this loop.

MW: You’ve previously said you’re very nice to yourself while writing but very critical while editing. How do you keep those two modes separate during the process?

HB: There are so many different phases of writing a novel, and I find it incredibly useful to separate them out as much as I can. I feel like I have entered the “editing” phase once I have a rough draft where all of the characters and events are roughly in the correct order, and I can see the final version of the book more clearly. This is a really wonderful feeling. It can also be an awful feeling—the initial limitless potential of the book is now narrowed. What I mean by “very critical” is that I try to hold myself to the initial standards of the idea. When you have a vague idea for a novel, it feels like a perfect thing that only needs to be transcribed. Then you have many hours, months, and years, of trying to bring that idea out onto the page. I try to be “nice” to myself during this part because I don’t want to scare the idea away, I want to set up a convivial and intimate dynamic between myself and the book, and I want it to feel—as much as is possible—like I’m shooting the shit with myself. It’s a long, uncertain process. Once I have the rough thing to work with, I just really want to see how good I can make it—and when I fix a scene to my liking, it’s incredibly satisfying.

MW: Early in your writing career, you said you try not to have fantasies about the future, so you won’t be disappointed. Now having published your third novel and experienced success in the literary world, do you still feel that way? 

HB: My work is critical of ambition and careerism. The characters who are the most devoted to career advancement, or who have the most naked ambition, are presented as arrogant buffoons who end up being humiliated in some absurd, deflating way. The characters in Banal Nightmare are mostly either frustrated artists, like Moddie and David, or working in art-adjacent careers, like Pam and Kimberly. There’s friction between these roles in the novel—animosity towards both the freedom of the artist and the safety of the career. I could just repeat David’s speech about how “careerist is a pejorative” but it’s so much more interesting for me to do this within a novel. It’s really interesting for me to have a character say something I hold very dear, and believe very deeply about art, and then in another scene have him say something that I find upsetting.

Editor’s note: The last question, after the break, includes plot details.

MW: The main character’s arc involves a sexual assault, and the book also includes some ruminations on #MeToo and the Kavanaugh hearings. I think they present an unorthodox approach to these issues, but I’m curious: how would you describe what you were trying to communicate with those elements?

HB: I don’t think it’s the role of the novel to present an orthodox approach to social issues.
That’s the role of propaganda. The characters talk about this distinction throughout the book.
There were a million creative challenges with this project. Can I introduce uncertainty,
complexity, and confusion into a character’s experience of sexual assault, while still giving full
respect to the experience? Structurally and narratively, how do I gain the trust needed to treat
the characters and the dynamics as I would in any novel, not as special “sexual violence
survivor and perpetrator” symbols—which was a trend that I found condescending and
emotionally narrow. Am I able to simultaneously show how fucked up assault is, and also show
the un-flattering behavior of allies? If I show the assault and its aftereffects in clear enough
detail, will the scene speak for itself? And, even if people forgot the assault scene, was there
something interesting there, too?

Writing about assault and the MeToo era in a way that felt honest and artistically free was
challenging, especially since I tend towards satire, social critique, and bizarre humor, it felt
important to me to try. Some of the scenes were very upsetting and difficult to write and read, so
I would try to follow those with a break, a shift, or some broader perspective. And sometimes I
would see how far I could push a character to say or think increasingly out-of-hand things
because agitated, shocked, or guilty laughter felt like the right emotional register.

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