May 6, 2024
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.
Starred review from June 1, 2024
Sex and the City meets Ottessa Moshfegh meets the quasi-campus satire in this wickedly funny novel. It's said that misery loves company; by Butler's reckoning, millennials love misery and other miserable millennials. Thirty-something Margaret Anne "Moddie" Yance returns to the Midwestern college town where she grew up; after splitting from her long-term boyfriend, she's in despair--at one moment wondering why she spent so much time with Nick, a "megalomaniac or perhaps a covert narcissist," and at others lamenting the loss of someone who knew her intimately and appreciated her biting humor...to a point. Most of Moddie's friends are hardly friends [insert sarcastic tone], and she has no idea how to play nicely with them. Indeed, she's a scathing critic, a kind of politically correct liberal who listens to NPR and relishes regurgitating facts from it. She tells a woman who loves Facebook that it's "the number one worldwide distributor of child pornography, but whatever helps you stay connected, I guess." At the same time, most of Moddie's "friends" are seriously and hilariously insipid; for example, they plan to address a high-profile campus sexual assault in a "global inter-student way" with "molestation and rape questionnaire[s]" at the beginning of the semester. Shifting from one point of view to another, sometimes within a single chapter, Butler skewers all her characters as they whine about being overworked by their academic jobs and unappreciated by their friends and significant others. Sound like fun? Butler writes with a bee-sting-sharp sense of humor and irony, and nothing is sacred, not Hillary Clinton, not Ruth Bader Ginsburg, not Christine Blasey Ford's testimony before Congress. What's most surprising is that this cooler-than-the-cool-kids novel actually has an emotional center that will make your pulse race. A tart, irrelevant rant of a novel that takes a sharp turn toward something more serious.
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June 1, 2024
Putting a new spin on what it means to be a killjoy, Butler (The New Me, 2019) delivers an emotionally riveting account of modern adulthood through different states of failures. Protagonist Moddie returns to her hometown, hoping to heal from a traumatizing breakup while reconnecting with her social circle, most of whom are equally miserable with stressful jobs and unfulfilling relationships. With her debut, Jillian (2015), coined by the Chicago Tribune as "the feel-bad book of the year," it's no surprise that Butler's third novel toys with the idea that misery loves company. Through layering undesirable sensations, such as anger and resentment, with uninhibited invocations of sex and sensuality, Banal Nightmare gets to the core of the dissatisfaction in contemporary, heterosexual relationships, including the unequal distribution of domestic and emotional labor. Alongside her exploration of heavy topics, such as sexual assault, Butler's narrative voice can also be comedic with a nihilist touch. Daring readers will eagerly turn the page to see their own unspeakable thoughts exposed by Butler.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.