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Banal Nightmare
A ferocious novel by one of the boldest voices in American fiction and the author of The New Me, the “definitive work of millennial literature” (The New Yorker)
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 Midwestern 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, and dream of wild triumphs and 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 Butler singularly captures the volatile, angry, aggrieved, surreal and entirely disorienting atmosphere of the modern era.
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 Midwestern 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, and dream of wild triumphs and 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 Butler singularly captures the volatile, angry, aggrieved, surreal and entirely disorienting atmosphere of the modern era.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published July 16, 2024
527 people are currently reading
19385 people want to read
About the author
Halle Butler
7 books1,456 followershere you can find a pretty lazy selection of a few books i've read. still haven't gotten around to the pillowman.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 875 reviews
October 21, 2024
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think there’s something deeply conceited and insincere about this new wave of fiction where every single character is relentlessly mean, bitter, and depressed.
Reading Banal Nightmare, I kept wondering what it was that Butler was trying to say with this book. Maybe that the performativity of liberal culture and the constant pressure to compare ourselves to others are turning us all into narcissists? If so, I think there are ways of exploring this topic that don’t require making all your characters excruciatingly boring and obnoxious.
The problem isn’t that everyone in this novel is unlikeable, it’s that they’re all unlikeable in the exact same way. The ten or so different narrators have such similar voices and thoughts that it was impossible for me to tell them apart. All the women are catty, jealous, and whiny; all the men are misogynistic, frustrated, and obsessed with dating younger women. Everyone hates their spouses. Being in their heads was a genuinely miserable experience, made worse by the fact that most of the book is made up of the characters’ inner monologue.
The dialogue also felt ridiculously over-manufactured, with characters going on long, rambling rants for no discernible reason. I assume the author was attempting to show how neurotic these people are, but she took the neurosis to a point where their conversations just felt absurd. The exaggerated unrealism of the dialogue gave the whole book a strange, surreal atmosphere, which felt out of place in an otherwise very grounded contemporary novel.
Overall, this was a complete miss for me. I guess I’m just over millennial fiction centering privileged people who wallow in self-pity while moaning about the hardships of middle-class life. As a millennial who is currently going through many of the experiences depicted in these stories, I don’t find this kind of narratives relatable at all. Frankly, I think they’re defeatist and mean spirited. If you want to write about unlikeable characters who are out of touch with reality (I’m thinking My Year of Rest and Relaxation or Succession), you need to give them some compelling qualities; self-loathing and ennui alone do not an interesting character make.
Reading Banal Nightmare, I kept wondering what it was that Butler was trying to say with this book. Maybe that the performativity of liberal culture and the constant pressure to compare ourselves to others are turning us all into narcissists? If so, I think there are ways of exploring this topic that don’t require making all your characters excruciatingly boring and obnoxious.
The problem isn’t that everyone in this novel is unlikeable, it’s that they’re all unlikeable in the exact same way. The ten or so different narrators have such similar voices and thoughts that it was impossible for me to tell them apart. All the women are catty, jealous, and whiny; all the men are misogynistic, frustrated, and obsessed with dating younger women. Everyone hates their spouses. Being in their heads was a genuinely miserable experience, made worse by the fact that most of the book is made up of the characters’ inner monologue.
The dialogue also felt ridiculously over-manufactured, with characters going on long, rambling rants for no discernible reason. I assume the author was attempting to show how neurotic these people are, but she took the neurosis to a point where their conversations just felt absurd. The exaggerated unrealism of the dialogue gave the whole book a strange, surreal atmosphere, which felt out of place in an otherwise very grounded contemporary novel.
Overall, this was a complete miss for me. I guess I’m just over millennial fiction centering privileged people who wallow in self-pity while moaning about the hardships of middle-class life. As a millennial who is currently going through many of the experiences depicted in these stories, I don’t find this kind of narratives relatable at all. Frankly, I think they’re defeatist and mean spirited. If you want to write about unlikeable characters who are out of touch with reality (I’m thinking My Year of Rest and Relaxation or Succession), you need to give them some compelling qualities; self-loathing and ennui alone do not an interesting character make.
February 7, 2024
like the time I binged $35 Doordash chili oil noodles: one-note dopamine hit, well made, strangely satisfying but woke me in the night needing to cleanse my palate, left chili oil smell/residue everywhere, cost of admission too high but won’t stop me from repeating the experience 6 months later when I’m depressed again
October 13, 2024
I love when a book can make you feel so bad like so so bad to the point where you feel worse for these fictional characters than you feel for yourself
July 21, 2024
this book wins the award for most accurate title. banal nightmare follows a cast of characters in the midwestern town of x, at the center of which is the eccentric, sometimes off-putting moddie. moddie moves back to x after a stint in chicago that ended in a bad breakup and the loss of all her friends in the city. we see her try to reintegrate herself into the social scene of her hometown, which is made up of many unhappy couples working at the local university. all of these characters are pretty much embodiments of the “i’m actually at capacity" meme.
butler is poking fun at the ways that the modern age has twisted our interactions with each other into fake shows of compassion, both for our so-called friends and for political/social causes. i get what she’s doing, it’s funny at times, but ultimately it grated on me and made my reading experience drag on for much longer than it should have. it took me almost 2 weeks to get to the halfway point and once i got there, i knew i needed to dedicate an entire morning to just finishing it, or else it would’ve taken another 2 weeks.
i think halle butler does the weird, deranged woman trope really skillfully. she did a great job of it in the new me (which i enjoyed immensely) and moddie similarly invokes both cringe and pity in the reader. butler knows how to make her characters subvert typical social cues and opt for the most bizarre interactions. we also get some deeper moments exploring moddie’s heartbreak and trauma, and you can see how both of those things have caused her to spiral. it’s dark but done really effectively.
i also admire butler for taking on a cast of characters in the third person here. the easy thing to do would’ve been to write this in the first person from moddie’s perspective only. although some of the characters blurred into each other at times, i think getting all of their perspectives gave this book something different from its contemporaries.
overall, i see the vision. i think butler is trying to push the “depressed woman moving” genre into new, more expansive and satirical territory. but you really have to be in a certain mindset to take on the banality of it all.
butler is poking fun at the ways that the modern age has twisted our interactions with each other into fake shows of compassion, both for our so-called friends and for political/social causes. i get what she’s doing, it’s funny at times, but ultimately it grated on me and made my reading experience drag on for much longer than it should have. it took me almost 2 weeks to get to the halfway point and once i got there, i knew i needed to dedicate an entire morning to just finishing it, or else it would’ve taken another 2 weeks.
i think halle butler does the weird, deranged woman trope really skillfully. she did a great job of it in the new me (which i enjoyed immensely) and moddie similarly invokes both cringe and pity in the reader. butler knows how to make her characters subvert typical social cues and opt for the most bizarre interactions. we also get some deeper moments exploring moddie’s heartbreak and trauma, and you can see how both of those things have caused her to spiral. it’s dark but done really effectively.
i also admire butler for taking on a cast of characters in the third person here. the easy thing to do would’ve been to write this in the first person from moddie’s perspective only. although some of the characters blurred into each other at times, i think getting all of their perspectives gave this book something different from its contemporaries.
overall, i see the vision. i think butler is trying to push the “depressed woman moving” genre into new, more expansive and satirical territory. but you really have to be in a certain mindset to take on the banality of it all.
people-reading-in-public
August 15, 2024Spotted a woman reading a hardcover copy while she was walking up a sunny UWS sidewalk arm-in-arm with her boyfriend/partner who was not reading a book and seemed to be guiding her between pedestrians and out of harm's way as she flipped pages
February 5, 2024
This is a deeply unsettling book about the ugliness of life in your thirties. In this novel, no one is happy. No one likes their friends or their partners. The single people are just as miserable as the ones who are married or in committed relationships. It’s a bleak portrait of life as a 30-something. It will also make you feel less alone if you’ve experienced anything close to what the characters face. Halle Butler shows us the worst versions of ourselves, our most hideous thoughts and feelings about life and other people, and makes us feel seen and understood. She puts unhealthy relationships on display - why they’re so hard to get out of, why even though we are absolutely better off by ourselves, it’s still so painful to be alone at the end of the day. This book left me feeling haunted, gross, exposed, and validated all at once. I’ve loved Halle Butler’s previous works, and I’m so thankful she wrote a much longer book this time. Worth the several years between novels.
Read
March 3, 2024I DNFd this line 75% of the way thru lol idk I just lost steam with this one and tried to read it while traveling and the narrator is just so miserable I couldn’t deal. Truly hateable the girlies ain’t ready for this one
July 19, 2024
A mean and boring satire of Millennial life. But is Millennial sadness really something that needs satirizing? If we’re all living it already, isn’t it just kind of “woe is me” or “woe is us” or even a kind of pick-me-ism of Millennialhood? “I’m not like the other Millennials” or “I am like the other Millennials but at least I have the sense to point it out and cringe about it.”
I don’t know. The writing is definitely honest and accurate, but that doesn’t mean it’s good or interesting. It’s not. There’s nothing at all literary about Banal Nightmare. The characters’ thoughts and words are either gross and harsh and mean or advertisement taglines, memes, and pop culture references. They’re either a cynical dick or a brainwashed consumerist sheep. There's a scene where a character relays a dream she had about using the bathroom and another character responds with the Olive Garden slogan, "When you're here you're family," and then simply says, "Poop dreams," "in reference to the documentary Hoop Dreams."
I guess the point is that these characters are stupid and sedate trapped inside the banality of late capitalism. But that seems to be the only point ever, hammered over and over. It's all various characters ranting about the same sorts of things in the same sort of voice. The scenes either comes off like an unhinged message you might rage type up in the group chat then actually nevermind erase or smug vignettes:
Is it getting by on cutesy wink and nod references, like ha-ha hypocritical liberals? Or ha-ha don’t we all hate scroll our conservative former high school classmates’ social media pages and ha-ha don't we all harbor resentment for our powerlessness amid the current political climate? Like maybe these things would be worth a "like" on twitter—I mean maybe—but nothing about them presented in this angry Facebook post format screams "this needs to be a book." There's barely even a novelistic thread linking them together, and often times they're fired off by random characters that never show up again. They’re just throwaway references, "gotchas."
Banal Nightmare is more like a series of narrative complaints than a novel and nothing about this worked for me. Hated every minute of it. But maybe I was supposed to.
I don’t know. The writing is definitely honest and accurate, but that doesn’t mean it’s good or interesting. It’s not. There’s nothing at all literary about Banal Nightmare. The characters’ thoughts and words are either gross and harsh and mean or advertisement taglines, memes, and pop culture references. They’re either a cynical dick or a brainwashed consumerist sheep. There's a scene where a character relays a dream she had about using the bathroom and another character responds with the Olive Garden slogan, "When you're here you're family," and then simply says, "Poop dreams," "in reference to the documentary Hoop Dreams."
I guess the point is that these characters are stupid and sedate trapped inside the banality of late capitalism. But that seems to be the only point ever, hammered over and over. It's all various characters ranting about the same sorts of things in the same sort of voice. The scenes either comes off like an unhinged message you might rage type up in the group chat then actually nevermind erase or smug vignettes:
Is it getting by on cutesy wink and nod references, like ha-ha hypocritical liberals? Or ha-ha don’t we all hate scroll our conservative former high school classmates’ social media pages and ha-ha don't we all harbor resentment for our powerlessness amid the current political climate? Like maybe these things would be worth a "like" on twitter—I mean maybe—but nothing about them presented in this angry Facebook post format screams "this needs to be a book." There's barely even a novelistic thread linking them together, and often times they're fired off by random characters that never show up again. They’re just throwaway references, "gotchas."
Banal Nightmare is more like a series of narrative complaints than a novel and nothing about this worked for me. Hated every minute of it. But maybe I was supposed to.
August 8, 2024
I love Halle Butler I love polarizing novels I love insufferable characters I love anything in conversation with HBO’s Girls and I hate you!
December 27, 2024
Dark Millennial fiction. At first I loved how dark and mean everyone was and then it felt like swimming through tar. Slick, sticky, pungent. The Millennials are NOT okay and if there was ever a warning sign about our use of therapy language and pseudo academic buzzwords to evade responsibility for anything, it's this book.
August 8, 2024
This book is aptly named & was frankly an exhausting read. I felt like every sentence was creative & witty as a standalone, but reading hundreds of pages of overwritten not-like-other-girls “insight” got old quickly
June 26, 2024
Major thanks to NetGalley and Random House for offering me an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest thoughts:
*3.5 - rounded up
"𝘓𝘪𝘧𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘢 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘶𝘳𝘦𝘴 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘣𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘳."
Crass. Mean-spirited. Ugly. Inside and out.
It's the kind of novel that has a stink that stays with you several days after. It 𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘭 stinks on me. Perhaps because Butler has, in essence, created the nightmare of reality. The uncomfortable. The unsettling. The disappointment. The frustration. All of being alive in your 30's. And I just turned 30!!! Thanks Butler!
You're not meant to like anyone here. And how does that line go again? Not everyone is meant to like you? Honestly, how do you put up with that? And how do you try to put up with that with others? Especially if you work with them? Especially if you live with them?
Through awful men, difficult situationships, and the pure disgust of being alive, Butler has held up the mirror to reality 10x magnification and stays put, hovering harsh over the biggest blemishes, in all the ways we endure.
"𝘔𝘢𝘺𝘣𝘦 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦 𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘩𝘢𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘶𝘪𝘵𝘺."
*3.5 - rounded up
"𝘓𝘪𝘧𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘢 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘱𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘶𝘳𝘦𝘴 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘣𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘳."
Crass. Mean-spirited. Ugly. Inside and out.
It's the kind of novel that has a stink that stays with you several days after. It 𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘭 stinks on me. Perhaps because Butler has, in essence, created the nightmare of reality. The uncomfortable. The unsettling. The disappointment. The frustration. All of being alive in your 30's. And I just turned 30!!! Thanks Butler!
You're not meant to like anyone here. And how does that line go again? Not everyone is meant to like you? Honestly, how do you put up with that? And how do you try to put up with that with others? Especially if you work with them? Especially if you live with them?
Through awful men, difficult situationships, and the pure disgust of being alive, Butler has held up the mirror to reality 10x magnification and stays put, hovering harsh over the biggest blemishes, in all the ways we endure.
"𝘔𝘢𝘺𝘣𝘦 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦 𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘩𝘢𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘶𝘪𝘵𝘺."
July 16, 2024
The synopsis of this book sums itself up perfectly in this quote: “Life was a disappointment through and through and pleasures wilted by the hour.”
If that doesn’t sound appealing—a group of depressed, self-loathing, thirty-something adults unpleased with the way their life has turned out—this may not be the book for you.
It was winding and meandering and the characters were often insufferable and angry and yet, they didn’t fail to dazzle me. The writing is superb and this book gave me more genuine open-mouthed “laugh out loud” moments than any other book before.
It will divide the masses.
If that doesn’t sound appealing—a group of depressed, self-loathing, thirty-something adults unpleased with the way their life has turned out—this may not be the book for you.
It was winding and meandering and the characters were often insufferable and angry and yet, they didn’t fail to dazzle me. The writing is superb and this book gave me more genuine open-mouthed “laugh out loud” moments than any other book before.
It will divide the masses.
January 9, 2024
4.5/5
this book is now so personal to me
this book is now so personal to me
August 12, 2024
If you're interested in a book about people in their thirties who act like immature teenagers, despise themselves and each other (friends qnd romantic partners including) and are deeply unhappy with their lives, then this one's for you. The whole story revolves around miserable characters leading miserable lives. I forced myself to read halfway through, hoping it would improve—it didn't, so I'm done. On the bright side, the cover is gorgeous!
March 15, 2024
halle is sublime
December 18, 2024
Reading this was a banal nightmare.
Banal Nightmare follows Moddie as she abruptly ends her long-term relationship and moves back to her Midwestern hometown. While there, she parties with old friends and reminisce on old life. Then, one of her pal invited an East Cost artist to take up a winter residency at the local university and somehow that's a bad thing.
The characters filtered through the point of view of Moddie and several others are terribly unlikeable but also they all sounded the same and they are unlikeable in also the same way. I get that them being unlikeable is the point of it but it just wasn't fun to read, not because the novel dealt or addresses difficult subject matter but because of how plain-jane the prose were, nor was it insightful in its venting.
So, yeah reading this was a banal nightmare. Cool cover though.
Banal Nightmare follows Moddie as she abruptly ends her long-term relationship and moves back to her Midwestern hometown. While there, she parties with old friends and reminisce on old life. Then, one of her pal invited an East Cost artist to take up a winter residency at the local university and somehow that's a bad thing.
The characters filtered through the point of view of Moddie and several others are terribly unlikeable but also they all sounded the same and they are unlikeable in also the same way. I get that them being unlikeable is the point of it but it just wasn't fun to read, not because the novel dealt or addresses difficult subject matter but because of how plain-jane the prose were, nor was it insightful in its venting.
So, yeah reading this was a banal nightmare. Cool cover though.
September 15, 2024
2.5 stars.
I didn't love Halle Butler's debut novel but this one was very different to The New Me. It follows a group of people and reads like a social drama and explores how friendship groups can change over time and people can betray each other. It was very funny and I thought the humour was really tongue in cheek and it was what I enjoyed most about the book. I didn't really gel with the characters though and felt slightly detached from the book. It's not a novel to take seriously and doesn't have any deep reflections about friendship, more just pokes fun at friendship groups and criticizes the pressure we put on ourselves to maintain toxic relationships. I wouldn't say I loved it but it was an entertaining read, however I'm not sure if I'll be reading more Halle Butler.
I didn't love Halle Butler's debut novel but this one was very different to The New Me. It follows a group of people and reads like a social drama and explores how friendship groups can change over time and people can betray each other. It was very funny and I thought the humour was really tongue in cheek and it was what I enjoyed most about the book. I didn't really gel with the characters though and felt slightly detached from the book. It's not a novel to take seriously and doesn't have any deep reflections about friendship, more just pokes fun at friendship groups and criticizes the pressure we put on ourselves to maintain toxic relationships. I wouldn't say I loved it but it was an entertaining read, however I'm not sure if I'll be reading more Halle Butler.
August 15, 2024
Oh, this kinda messed me up. I loved THE NEW ME and was ready for more of that energy, and it is here, but the potency is cranked up to a million. My jaw was on the floor multiple times a chapter. Admittedly, the first few chapters weren't doing it for me, and I struggled to latch onto the third-person multiple-POV writing, but once it hit, it hit. I didn't think I'd end up giving it five stars, but the last half just knocked the wind out of me so hard.
October 1, 2024
I recently turned 26 and can confidently say that the past six months have been the happiest I've been. Thanks Halle Butler for letting me know that it's all downhill from here 😊
April 19, 2024
received this ARC from Netgalley prior to its July 16 publication! Thank you, Netgalley and Halle Butler's team for allowing me early access!
If you're a fan of Anna Dorn, Lisa Taddeo, or Ottessa Moshfegh, look no futher!
I read 'The New Me' last year, and I really enjoyed Halle Butler's writing style. I wasn't obsessed with that one, but I knew I wanted to give Halle Butler another shot with a different plot. Banal Nightmare follows a cast of characters in a Midwest town called 'X', primarily Moddie, a listless and dynamic character who is spiraling shortly after a break up with a long-term boyfriend that has caused her to flee her comfortable life in Chicago to the comfort of her childhood 'friends'. Though much of Banal Nightmare follows Moddie herself, Halle Butler also ushers us into the perspective of other side-characters, their failing marriages and their shameful sexual fantasies alongside the satirical interpersonal relationships with one another. I loved this omniscient narrator view of the friend group that gives each character so much more depth. All of these characters are tantalizingly hateable and unreliable. Relatable in one breath followed by a monologue so fucked up it could knock you off of your feet. Truly. Halle Butler's writing style has gotten funnier and smarter overall. The wit and charm and edge in this book is amazing.
I waffled back and forth on giving this one a 5 star. I feel like my dilemma with this one is not a dilemma I typically have with books.
- There were a LOT of characters. I could NOT keep some characters straight. Pam or Kim? Craig, David, Bobby? Bethany? Nina? Chrissy? TOO MANY. At first I got really hung up on keeping them all straight and making sure I was connecting each character to their back story, but after a while I decided to just keep reading even when I was a little lost. That made it so much more enjoyable for me, because I could spend more time enjoying the scenes and dialogue I was in.
This book made me laugh out loud several times. It took me a minute to get into it, but by the time I got to about the 50% mark, I had trouble putting it down.
Make sure to check trigger warnings. There's a pretty descriptive scene of SA in this one. Very poignant and though-provoking, but its in there nonetheless for those who may find that hard to read!
If you're a fan of Anna Dorn, Lisa Taddeo, or Ottessa Moshfegh, look no futher!
I read 'The New Me' last year, and I really enjoyed Halle Butler's writing style. I wasn't obsessed with that one, but I knew I wanted to give Halle Butler another shot with a different plot. Banal Nightmare follows a cast of characters in a Midwest town called 'X', primarily Moddie, a listless and dynamic character who is spiraling shortly after a break up with a long-term boyfriend that has caused her to flee her comfortable life in Chicago to the comfort of her childhood 'friends'. Though much of Banal Nightmare follows Moddie herself, Halle Butler also ushers us into the perspective of other side-characters, their failing marriages and their shameful sexual fantasies alongside the satirical interpersonal relationships with one another. I loved this omniscient narrator view of the friend group that gives each character so much more depth. All of these characters are tantalizingly hateable and unreliable. Relatable in one breath followed by a monologue so fucked up it could knock you off of your feet. Truly. Halle Butler's writing style has gotten funnier and smarter overall. The wit and charm and edge in this book is amazing.
I waffled back and forth on giving this one a 5 star. I feel like my dilemma with this one is not a dilemma I typically have with books.
- There were a LOT of characters. I could NOT keep some characters straight. Pam or Kim? Craig, David, Bobby? Bethany? Nina? Chrissy? TOO MANY. At first I got really hung up on keeping them all straight and making sure I was connecting each character to their back story, but after a while I decided to just keep reading even when I was a little lost. That made it so much more enjoyable for me, because I could spend more time enjoying the scenes and dialogue I was in.
This book made me laugh out loud several times. It took me a minute to get into it, but by the time I got to about the 50% mark, I had trouble putting it down.
Make sure to check trigger warnings. There's a pretty descriptive scene of SA in this one. Very poignant and though-provoking, but its in there nonetheless for those who may find that hard to read!
January 17, 2024
This is Halle Butler at her best. A witty, deadpan, meandering, and relatable story with a cast of characters who you love to loathe. This book felt like watching a reality TV show where you're witnessing a group of people all seemingly competing among themselves to see whose life is secretly more fucked up, and they're all winning.
August 1, 2024
no one can write white women like Halle Butler can
December 23, 2025
Banal Nightmare by Halle Butler is an utterly pointless book featuring miserable characters who are bitter as fuck and love to hate each other (or hate to love each other. The jury’s still out). The writing is clever and quirky, and it’s almost impressive that someone can write so well, for so long, without saying anything memorable. You’d think the bit where the book spoke about a dude who taped Matt Damon’s face on pinecones would make an impression on me (I’m Matt Damon’s no. 1 fan thank you) but I don’t even remember where that was coming from or who the dude was.
I suppose that’s my review. The book has no plot and mostly reads like a meticulously written Petty Olympics. Irrelevant and irreverent 🤷♀️
Nice cover, though.
I suppose that’s my review. The book has no plot and mostly reads like a meticulously written Petty Olympics. Irrelevant and irreverent 🤷♀️
Nice cover, though.
May 29, 2025
What an apt title.
This was SO miserable, yet funny/silly (at times).
I don't remember much about this novel as I read it almost a year ago. It almost felt artificial in how real it was trying to be? I don't know if that makes sense, but it didn't seem as genuine as some other millennial books I've read.
Even with this lackluster review, I still find myself wanting to read more from Butler.
Thank you NetGalley and Random House for the ARC!
This was SO miserable, yet funny/silly (at times).
I don't remember much about this novel as I read it almost a year ago. It almost felt artificial in how real it was trying to be? I don't know if that makes sense, but it didn't seem as genuine as some other millennial books I've read.
Even with this lackluster review, I still find myself wanting to read more from Butler.
Thank you NetGalley and Random House for the ARC!
July 23, 2024
If you want to spend 336 pages with highly despicable, unlikeable characters, have I got a book for you!
September 19, 2024
I’ve never hated every character in a book so bad
August 15, 2025
Er det reelt meningen at man skal kunne lide bare én af karaktererne i den her?
May 19, 2025
This book is so sharp and intelligent and written with such pronounced intention that I couldn't stop reading despite many of the characters being downright unlikeable. The quick-switching, close-third person POV worked wonderfully as we got to see how certain characters' interior life was often so different from the expectations of those viewing them from outside. The two-thirds or so is often laugh-out-loud funny, but the books moves in more serious directions towards the end. Loved it.
January 10, 2025
i adore halle butler and think she brings something so unique and fresh to the 'sad girl lit fic' genre that has become so oversaturated over the years. however, this book did feel a bit too...miserable at times. like every character was like this, and sometimes it felt a bit tiring to get through.
thank you random house for the arc!
thank you random house for the arc!
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