Banal Nightmare begins at an ending. Margaret Anne (‘Moddie’) breaks up with her partner, Nick, an archetypal horrible heterosexual man well into his thirties. A disciple of his own theory that ‘all men are more likely to be attracted to women in their twenties’, Nick soon starts sleeping with a 24-year-old arts administrator. Moddie leaves Chicago and repairs to her hometown, where she reconnects with old friends and tries to involve herself in a social world that circles around the local university. When David, a visiting artist, arrives, he brings with him the possibility of romance.

Moddie has made the two changes we all talk about: dumping him and leaving the city. The question that underpins Halle Butler’s novel is whether doing so will lead to a substantially different life. Moddie meets people who also seem stuck. David starts ‘to feel bitterness creep into his fleeting optimism’, and then there’s Kimberly, who cannot ‘wait for her life to be different’. The world of Banal Nightmare is one in which proximate individuals have coffee and catch up with each other, all the while feeling deeply alone and despairing about the spiritual and material conditions of their lives. The community is there, but the connections seem superficial and vapid. 

As in Butler’s first two novels, self-awareness and observational acuity course through the mean, eye-rolling humour. Moddie reflects on the ‘smug pleasure’ her old Chicago friends took in ‘giving up’ on their art practice and the childish look of her vibrator as opposed to the alternatives. which appeared too