The second book for my newly minted ‘she’s not doing okay at all’ Goodreads shelf is Banal Nightmare by Halle Butler.

The story begins with Moddie, fresh from the break-up of a long-term relationship and skirting middle age, she returns to the town where she spent her university years. Her close friend, Nina, and frenemy, Pam, still live there, although their lives are very different now – mortgages, careers, thoughts of having a family dominate conversations. Moddie, once an artist but more recently a grant writer for an arts charity, struggles to fill her empty days and feels unfulfilled and discontented.

She walked for a while, feeling peaceful, happy, and optimistic, and then sat on a bench to warm herself in the sun. She starred vacantly at the coeds, who laughed and screamed, blissfully unaware of what boredom and anguish were to come a mere decade later in their lives.

Butler explores the tension between freedom and being bound by adult ‘milestones’ – some might call this simply growing up, however, Butler’s examination is more nuanced. Her characters (predominantly artists and academics) are discovering that pursuing the tightly-held dreams of their twenties is not necessarily compatible with the additional desires of their thirties. Free-spririted artists may like to go where their creative energy takes them, but they still have to eat.

This book could have quite satisfactorily played out Moddie’s story until she found her creative mojo again and got her life on track, but Butler is cleverer than that and does two things that are unexpected. Firstly, we learn that Moddie has been the victim of a sexual assault from a man she considered a friend. Without losing the essence of the characters, Butler momentarily puts the satire on hold and lets Moddie tell her story. It’s a deeply affecting piece of writing, and yet the outcome fits with the overall satirical tone of the book.

Secondly, the story is not told exclusively from Moddie’s point of view. Instead, we get the private rants of some of the peripheral characters. Their anger, their vitriol, their delusions, their self-importance – it’s all there and it’s engrossing and very funny.

There wasn’t anything special about Moddie, all she knew how to do was draw dicks. Anybody could draw dicks. Pam felt herself get very angry about this, and she picked up a pen and drew a small dick in the margin of her notebook and then scribbled it out.

Once a week, Pam left the office after lunch. This was when she did her chores. Years ago, she’d stopped asking Craig to help, preferring instead the simmering resentment.

The inner voice of various characters (essentially they all express complex disdain for themselves) highlights an overall stylistic theme for the book – a ‘zooming in’ and ‘zooming out’. It’s a wild ride – a hyper-focus on small details and pages-long scenes with a slow-build are played against cutting one-liners and Butler’s dead-pan delivery. I don’t mind a bit of reading whiplash!

Moddie had to stop for a second because she was feeling a little high and she couldn’t remember if she actually had a personality or opinions or if she was just a vessel through which bullshit passed.

Especially since she’d quit smoking, she’d noticed herself feeling intermittently flirtatious, not flirtatious with anyone in particular, but she had been listening to Sade at night, and twice she’d seen herself in the mirror and thought, Well, that’s not so awful.

Butler writes exactly my type of satire – it’s not overdone and she manages to soften the edge by exposing emotional vulnerabilities. Too much either way and the book would either be mean or tiring.

Life was a disappointment through and through and pleasures wilted by the hour.

There’s a surprising conclusion to this book, which will leave some readers feeling that any scorn they felt for the (unlikeable) characters was justified. I say ‘some’ readers because I think the conclusion captured the point – that we can spend a lot of energy judging others (and pretending that somewhere in our judgements is a strong sense of self-awareness), and yet, it doesn’t make us happier.

4/5

When she got there, she hugged them both and set a six-pack and a two-pound bulk bag of gummy worms on the coffee table.
“Huh, that’s quirky,” said Craig.
“I have PTSD,” said Moddie.