‘Banal Nightmare’ by Halle Butler    (2024) – 315 pages

In ‘Banal Nightmare’, the young woman Moddie, in her early thirties, breaks up with Nick, her boyfriend of nine years, and leaves Chicago. She returns to the small mid-western town where she went to high school.

She reunites with some of her old friends from high school, most of whom are now either married or have long-term boyfriends. There’s Pam, Kimberley, Bethany, Nina, and a few others. All these 1990s birth names seem almost interchangeable. Most of these women are either married or are in a long-term relationship with a guy. Over the years familiarity and boredom have crept in to these male/female relationships.

“…but of course he’d said “I want a divorce” before, what couple hadn’t?”

Moddie herself is quite at a loss after deliberately ending her long-time affair with Nick. Moddie considers “how unessential she was to the rest of the world now that she was childless, unemployed, middle-aged and single.”

“She thought mostly of herself and her emotions. It felt like her brain was rotting. When she talked to her parents, it was only about herself and her feelings. The boredom was like a cheese grater run gently over her heart, constantly, and sometimes she felt she would give anything to leave her own mind for just one second.”

A lot of ‘Banal Nightmare’ is attitude, Moddie’s wise-girl attitude which is often humorous and sometimes poignant. She is hesitant to dive into the dating pool again.

“For the love of god, no more losers, no more strivers, no more men with something to prove about themselves.”

In this type of novel, of course the men, especially Nick, are mostly described as losers, but Halle Butler doesn’t let the women off the hook either.

“Which is all just to say that when he thought unkind things about women, it wasn’t without reason.”

“unleashing her opinions in a voluble bilious way ,, and further alienating people who already had a low opinion of her”

Although ‘Banal Nightmare’ mostly follows Moddie’s sharp sarcastic thoughts, her stream of consciousness, occasionally we enter the mind of a male character, David, the one single guy in the story. This provides some balance to the account.

A novel about millennial relationship trials and tribulations has to go some distance to separate itself from and rise above all the other novels about millennial relationship trials and tribulations. ‘Banal Nightmare’ almost makes it.

Grade:   B