Sometimes referred to as the hot-mess-millennial novel, this genre is typically set around the turn of the 21st century, with authors born (more or less) between the years of 1981 and 1996. Ottessa Moshfegh, Sally Rooney, Elif Batuman and Marlowe Granados are all at the table, swapping snarks and confessions that are equal parts self-indulgent and self-aware. But as Rooney explores in her most recent novel, “Beautiful World, Where Are You,” the millennial girl-woman must age and, with her, the novel that bears her scowling visage.
Fame, climate anxiety, choosing a car seat: What’s next for these morose protagonists? It’s clear that Halle Butler has some thoughts. Her first two novels, “Jillian” and “The New Me,” dove deep into the heart of millennial darkness, as her characters veered between obliviousness and startling self-knowledge. She explored the impulse to obsess, the way women vilify one another and the soul-crushing nature of work, menial, creative or otherwise.
Her new novel, “Banal Nightmare,” is her most ambitious yet, a multi-vocal opus about living as a cog in the capital-C culture machine. It also zeroes in on an age-old question: “Is everyone awful, or is it just me?” Protagonist Moddie leaves the lonely city of Chicago to move to the unnamed Midwestern college town where she grew up; her trauma follows her, as does her bad attitude. Older but not wiser, Moddie is haunted by the end of her last relationship and the callous indifference of her ex’s friend group. Her 20s may be past, in other words, but they are far from behind her.
To that end, Moddie’s inner life is punctuated by fantasies of self-harm and harm to others, including a graphic description of stabbing, maiming, practically liquefying a famous conservative activist, only to have him, somehow, still come out the victor. That is how vividly, chillingly current this book reads and feels.
In “Banal Nightmare,” Butler pushes her darkly humorous, mean-spirited worldview to its limits. And while the focus largely remains on Moddie and her friends, the narration declines to honor these characters’ solipsism. The novel wanders away from the action or a character’s inner life to follow some geese for a paragraph or to peek in as “someone’s mom lay awake in bed having a sexual fantasy about a colleague.” These moments feel capacious, delightfully cinematic in a genre that is otherwise very internal. Frankly, sometimes you need a break from these people, and so does the book.
Butler’s focal points are all 30- and 40-something “creatives” (academics who dabble in criticism; sculptors with day jobs; ungrateful art monsters) with interchangeable, anachronistically yuppie names and issues. They believe they missed the boat, personally and professionally, because they married the wrong person, went to a lesser school or failed to conquer the Western canon in their youth. “You just have to learn everything you can by the time you’re twenty-seven,” Pam gripes, “because by then, your life is pretty much decided. … You chose what you chose, and life is basically over.”
There’s Kimberly, who fumes about how the best creative jobs go to the mediocre rich, while secretly believing that she, as a White woman from a working-class background, is among society’s most worthy victims. In line with many of Butler’s characters across novels, Kim is a little bit right, a little bit wrong and mostly embarrassing herself.
And there’s Bethany, an administrator doing a victory lap over the one, one, article she published in the New York Times, not aware that “everyone had gotten together at Panera after the piece was published and confessed they didn’t love it.” It turns out success and failure, in the artistic fields at least, are virtually indistinguishable. One professor character quietly, aptly admits to himself that it is “much more likely he would be fired than carried out of the building on a chair by screaming and adoring students.”
Butler’s grown-up millennial girl-woman novel looks a little like Julia May Jonas’s “Vladimir” or Sarah Braunstein’s “Bad Animals,” detailed character studies that double as grotesque institutional burlesques. There’s cringeworthy, sometimes triggering material in “Banal Nightmare,” but it is also quite funny.
And one thing you can say about Butler’s characters: Despite their insecurities, they’re mostly well-read. Deliberating on her attachment to Edith Wharton’s 1905 “The House of Mirth,” Moddie explains, “I like it because I’m a … masochist with a weak ego, and I love being emotionally manipulated by a master pervert, duh.” Wharton is the master pervert in question, but one suspects that Butler has that title taped to the top of her computer screen for inspiration, and, certainly, weak masochists looking for a lightly depraved read might give “Banal Nightmare” a look.
As literature looks back to look forward, Butler’s latest offers a compelling map for where she and the genre might go from here: still mean, though not meaner than before, and with bigger stakes for the protagonist and the world she lives in.
Is the sad millennial girl going to make it after all? No, of course not. In her defense, she’s been telling you that all along.
Annie Berke is the author of “Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television.”
Banal Nightmare
Random House. 336 pp. $28
