Banal Nightmare
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 16 Jul 2024
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- £11.99
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- Pre-Order
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
'Halle Butler is a first-rate satirist of the horror show being sold to us as Modern Femininity. She is Thomas Bernhard in a bad mood, wearing ill-fitting tights, scrutinizing old take-out leftovers' CATHERINE LACEY
'Her 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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Butler's cutting latest (after The New Me), an aimless young woman leaves Chicago for the Midwestern university town where she grew up. Fleeing her toxic boyfriend, Nick, and a city she's come to see as an "enervating wasteland of superficial friendships with people I did not respect," Moddie plans to reconnect with her high school friends and make new ones, but she frequently alienates people with her unfiltered speech and strong opinions (her criticisms of "tedious" celebrity interviews on NPR cause her friend Pam to look at Moddie as if she were "incoherently ranting about the CIA"). The men in the novel—other characters' partners and an artist who claims he invented New Media, whom Moddie humiliates during a game of air hockey—are for the most part cartoonishly vile. There are tender moments, too, as Moddie opens up to Pam about Nick's emotional abuse and her failures as an artist. For all of Moddie's anarchic energies, her character arc feels conventional, though it serves as a vehicle for Butler's laser-sighted satire of millennial conformity. This sharply funny novel pulls no punches.
