Banal Nightmare
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Narrated by:
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Ruby McCollister
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By:
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Halle Butler
About this listen
'Butler's sense of humour should be studied and celebrated' DAVID SEDARIS
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
Critic reviews
Banal Nightmare will end summer with a bang. It's about turning 37 and realising you hate everybody you know. So funny, so smart, utterly vicious - just brilliant (Zadie Smith)
The best, and also the most hilarious, new novel I've read in the past year (Jonathan Franzen)
I inhaled that book. Such a vivid, gripping, and hilarious voice that Butler has. Everything is familiar but heightened and slightly askew. I was deeply charmed and moved (Claire Danes)
The Feel Bad Novel of the Year . . . darkly humorous and brutally honest
Halle Butler is one of the funniest and most exacting novelists of millennial precarity. Banal Nightmare is worth reading just to experience Butler's virtuosic prose. Deadpan, hyper-articulate, quietly affecting
Butler has crafted a novel in which every character proves to be completely, uniquely crazy. Her sense of humour should be studied and celebrated (David Sedaris)
So searingly precise in its ability to capture a certain moment or experience that you have to stop every few pages to send another perfect quote to your group chat . . . It will be immediately and uncomfortably relatable to anyone who has spent nights chain-smoking on a balcony, contemplating their own personal, sexual and social mistakes
Highly intelligent, witty and completely precise in its skewering (Susannah Dickey, author of Tennis Lessons)
I loved Banal Nightmare. I was laughing and underlining and laughing. I'm recommending it to so many people. Halle Butler is an absolute genius (Nicole Flattery, author of Show Them a Good Time)
In Halle Butler's world, everyone hates each other, every day is excruciating in its mundanity, every thought is the beginning of an Escherian journey round and round in hell, and somehow the whole thing is unbelievably funny. With the force of an episode of marijuana psychosis and the extreme detail of a hyperrealistic work of art, Banal Nightmare attempts transcendence through anxiety and dissociation, nailing a series of contemporary characters - better pray you're not one of them - to the wall (Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror)
Brilliantly observed and unsparing, Banal Nightmare is an intense, exhilarating, often-hilarious kaleidoscopic inquiry into contemporary relationships. With the comprehensive social gaze of Balzac and the cold logic of Renata Adler, Halle Butler conjures a latticework structure of life, rage, dark humor, and incalculable grace (Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace)
Oh man, this book! Halle Butler's new novel is a blistering assault on contemporary pieties about art and love, an epic Woolfian tapestry of perfect comic rants, terrifying panic attacks, and, most gratifying of all, sincere attempts at human connection. This is the best, most ambitious book yet by one of my favourite writers (Andrew Martin, author of Early Work)
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