As a female novelist who was born in 1985, Halle Butler is routinely mentioned alongside other millennial writers such as Ottessa Moshfegh, Sally Rooney, Catherine Lacey, and Raven Leilani. The laziness of these comparisons reminds me of what Butler often satirizes: someone in an office cubicle halfheartedly putting together an Excel spreadsheet toward the end of a tough week. Their eyes are on the clock. Patricia Lockwood? Is that another one? Sure, why not? Let’s be honest, nobody really cares about their job anyway. Put those women together, it’s fine, it’s nearly 5:00 PM. This is funny, in a way Butler might find funny, since the idea that animates all three of her novels is that not all millennials are born equal.
Butler’s work stands out in a number of ways. Firstly there is never any sex. Occasionally there is the memory of sex, with a weak boyfriend who had to leave because the narrator was a nightmare to deal with, or a longing for touch that can be gratified by leaning on a good-smelling person on public transit. There is little to no commentary on the Internet, except for a character going online to buy some horrible, confusing clothes in the hope of reinvention, or to e-mail someone a hate screed. Butler makes these small moments sing, and her dialogue is as precise and finely tuned as a playwright’s.*
When I read her slim, dread-inducing novels, I feel the same excitement as when I read something deeply and truly mean, mean in its heart, like Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat (1970), a novella about a woman essentially plotting her own murder. Butler’s worldview is similarly black, and like Spark’s, her women are defective, strange, unbending. In Butler’s latest novel, Banal Nightmare, about a bunch of self-described creatives muddling through in the Midwest, she spares no one. Moddie Yance, in her early thirties, returns to her hometown after spending her twenties in Chicago with a boyfriend who decides she is “not interesting or funny or smart or cool.” She has been tempted back by cheap rent, old friends, and the prospect of becoming a better, more thoughtful version of herself. Instead she finds a group of artistically stifled, angry, and disappointed men and women in their thirties who claim they like to socialize together. They are all unhappy and unfulfilled and put one another through huge amounts of psychic torture in the name of nothing at all. It’s very funny.
Butler has little regard for dramatic moments or operatic scenes: her characters are undone by small deceits, selfishness, their secret spitefulness, their inability to get out of their own way. In fact, given the sexual repression and deadening outlook of each of her three novels, the closest progenitor I can think of for her work is the British sitcom: Nighty Night, The Office, Fawlty Towers. Her characters are trapped in cycles of indignity, in confined settings (offices, apartments), surrounded by people who hate them. Butler has a comedian’s tics, too—the monologues against society’s ills, the dissatisfaction, the bottomless exasperation.
The minor key in which all of Banal Nightmare is written, and the snippiness of its frenemies, might suggest the six months you spend living at home, feeling nostalgic for a childhood you didn’t have, drinking too much and telling your friends, who don’t care even slightly, that you once had something published in a literary journal. Butler is not convinced that art can offer any real validation. Here is Moddie in Banal Nightmare:
Art was to be merely—barely—tolerated as a pitiful inconvenience to functioning society, and…throughout her life—unless she were to make great sums of money off of her art and prove that she was smiled upon and chosen by god to re-create his infinite beauty for the betterment of man—people at parties would call her “artsy,” “creative,” “funky,” and “special.”
People at parties are a major concern of Butler’s, so it’s no surprise that one of her major influences is Edith Wharton. Like Wharton, she thinks about money and objects and the ruinous potential of social outings above all else. In Banal Nightmare she actually mentions Wharton, during a stoned conversation between Moddie and her friend Nina:
The reason I like House of Mirth…is not because I think it’s a morally pure feminist examination of patriarchal structures, in fact I know Edith Wharton said point-blank she wasn’t a feminist. I like it because I’m a fucking masochist with a weak ego, and I love being emotionally manipulated by a master pervert, duh.
A lot has been written about the S-M relationships that have appeared in various millennial novels, but if anyone is wielding the whip here, it’s Butler. Like Wharton, she loves to punish: she’s the Daddy.
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Butler’s first novel, Jillian (2015), earned her a place on Granta’s 2017 Best of Young American Novelists list. Its protagonist, Megan, is only twenty-four and constantly feels like she made a bad mistake somewhere back in middle school. She lives with her boyfriend, Randy, who finds her intolerable, and she talks all the time about her colleague Jillian, a thirty-something single mother. They are both receptionists at a doctor’s office. Jillian, Megan suspects, is secretly deranged, with a disorganized life, a messy car, and possibly a personality disorder. She is a malevolent blight on Megan’s life and happiness, and whenever Jillian tries to speak to her or show her cute things on the Internet, Megan desperately faces the wall or looks out the window, clenches her jaw, has violent fantasies. Jillian just wants to get a dog, as she tells Megan:
“Yeah well I’m pretty sure my little boy really wants a dog, and I think the most important thing for a special needs dog to have is love.”
Oh my god, this dog is going to die within a week, thought Megan.
Megan, like a lot of millennials, has a little hobby of putting a pillow over her face and screaming, “Fuck!” She likes to get blackout drunk and embarrass her boyfriend in front of his friends, whom she finds merely pretentious in her more generous moments and “satanic” the rest of the time. Mostly she walks around feeling like “a warty little toad or a troll or a guy who was so visibly lonely that everyone thought he might start beating off or crying just for the feeling of connection he would get from all that wild, concentrated attention.”
But she is right about Jillian, who is in a troubling descent of her own. She has a worsening addiction to painkillers after a made-up car accident, a court date, a child the reader develops genuine concern about, and a dog she is practically leaving to die in the bathroom. Both Jillian and Megan are paranoid, but not without reason. Their boyfriends are planning to break up with them, their colleagues discuss them behind their backs, their acquaintances intentionally commit microaggressions against them. Jillian doesn’t hint at a better future for either of the two women, which feels right. Their attempts at improvement are deluded—Internet meditation techniques that are akin to placing a Band-Aid over a gaping wound. Everything smells like dog piss. They’re both slowly realizing they’re capable of murder.
What stops Jillian from becoming airless and repetitive is Butler’s sense of comic timing and her total, refreshing mercilessness. Millennial fiction has tended to involve a generous outpouring of sympathy for its characters, and a condemnation of that eternal bogeyman, late capitalism. Late capitalism is why your apartment isn’t appropriately furnished, and there are some deep but unmentionable fractures in your friendships, and you aren’t getting any design commissions even though your ideas are actually excellent. Butler considers the housing market, the growing threats of neoliberalism and climate change, and instead asks: What if you’re just a boring jerk?
Her real enemy is the careerism of the millennial. Those creatives with their cheerful social media bios, their do-gooding, their desire for constant affirmation, their lazy thinking, their need to label and categorize, their lives that seem to be only an ad for their lifestyles, “those fuckers and their homemade Tupperwares of kale.” Something went deeply wrong when we sat down and set up our Facebook profiles. (Moddie, in Banal Nightmare, making friends as usual, informs partygoers that Facebook is “the number one worldwide distributor of child pornography, but whatever helps you stay connected, I guess.”) If you think civilization is on the brink of collapse, why do you keep telling me about your latest collaboration? Why do you keep asking me to look at your website? At a party Megan thinks, “Oh my god, everyone in this world is way too interested in things.”
Butler’s second book, The New Me (2019), continues her campaign of disillusionment, but it lacks the freshness of Jillian. Millie, in her twenties, is temping for a furniture company and has broken up with a boyfriend named James, “who had a talent for making [her] feel mean.” She likes watching Forensic Files, a documentary show featuring rote descriptions of murder, which she describes as “mostly about construction and façade.” Forensic Files is the only way Millie, who is safely ensconced in an apartment that her parents seem to pay for, can feel danger and risk. It’s a sad, punishing life worsened by a monologue of self-hatred. An uptight woman named Karen at the furniture company wants to have Millie fired for no reason apart from general vibes.
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Butler’s roving voice allows Karen to be the butt of the joke too: Karen’s superiority is a delusion (“Sometimes she felt like she was working in a day care center”), and she hugely overestimates her importance at the company. Her dominance over Millie allows her to feel a modicum of control, a sliver of accomplishment, the defeat of a loser—a pure American feeling. All the aspirational thinking in The New Me is based on a particular 2019 consumerism that I associate with girlbossery. At one point Millie thinks, “I should get a cat or a plant or some nice lotion or some Whitestrips, start using a laundry service, start taking myself both more and less seriously.” In this sense the novel is almost a time capsule. Isn’t it sweet to hark back to an era, only six years ago, when we believed in the self-improving power of having slightly whiter teeth?
Butler, like Wharton, punishes her characters for thinking of themselves as all surface. Millie is constantly analyzing how she appears to others, her clothes, her smell, her face, how she looks sitting at her desk, how she looks sitting on her couch. She’s sloppy, but that doesn’t stop her from being vain. She is less disgusted by a society in which everyone is constantly assessing one another’s value than by her own less-than-stellar position in it. At a party, apropos of nothing, she asks a guy if he likes James Dean movies. “On the Waterfront,” she presses, by way of example—but that’s Marlon Brando. Millie doesn’t even pay attention to the films she’s referencing. She herself is like an adolescent in one of those Fifties pictures, constantly screaming about societal expectations and authenticity, ranting and raving against a perceived enemy, trashing her teenage bedroom and threatening to drive her car off a cliff because she can’t go to the dance. The novel is a short, sometimes highly wearying temper tantrum.
In the critical writing on Sad Girl Novelists, there has been a tendency to examine these writers as if they were temps: they’ll do for the moment, but we better get someone serious in here pretty quickly. And, as with temps, an assumption lingers that they don’t know what they’re doing. I’d argue that Butler knows exactly what she’s doing, down to each sentence. Some of the reviews of The New Me scold her for the fact that Millie is privileged: she has no student loans and no rent to pay. The privilege is the point.
The New Me lacks the anarchy and enlivening weirdness of Jillian, but it has one great moment of genuine feeling. Millie returns home to her parents, and her mother takes her out to reaffirm her faith in her daughter. This could be sentimental but because of the misery that has preceded it, it comes almost as a reprieve:
On the drive home, I lie down in the back seat. The seat belt twists around my guts. I’m slightly drunk, and I watch the streetlights pass above my head. These beautiful people always keep a box of tissues in the back seat of their car. Their politeness and rightness, to me, in this moment, is boundless.
Millie’s parents are real, whole people, capable of simple kindness, shaped by entirely different economic circumstances and a less materialistic, less competitive worldview. If Millie is a monster, like Undine Spragg in Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913), then she is a monster we’ve made. She’s been distorted and stunted by a pampered childhood, soulless work, a deafening self-interest, the avatar of herself that she’s invented and sent out into the world, the search for an artistic city life, the uneasy pursuit of success and validation. What if we all just gave up on it, moved home, shopped for stretchy pants at the mall, were nicer to one another, and indulged our niche interests? Wouldn’t life be better? And freer? Butler answers that question in her most accomplished novel, Banal Nightmare: it wouldn’t. People are everywhere, and the problem is those people are just like you.
Banal Nightmare begins with Moddie returning to the Midwestern town of X
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. She was trying not to think about it, trying to have a decent time in her new life, but invariably some bleak thought would draw her back and then the memories would start, vivid, cinematic, relentless, like a brainwashing clip reel for a cult with an unclear mission statement.
In contrast to the relationship plateaus in Butler’s other novels, Moddie’s relationship with her boyfriend didn’t slowly wither but ended after she had sex three times with a colleague who had been taking court-mandated anger management classes. After their final tryst she pretends to read Walt Whitman on a bench and realizes that
she had been effectively dead, without a single emotional or spiritual or intellectual stirring in her adult life, until this tyrannical little idiot, a man she had no respect for or interest in, had harangued her into touching his dick in the supply closet.
The execution of Banal Nightmare is grander than that of Butler’s first two novels, and I was moved not only by her satire—which has only gotten harsher, deeper, more caustic—but by the way she has learned to fully inhabit her material. The novel explores a dysfunctional dynamic among a group of friends approaching middle age. The male characters, in classic middle-aged fashion, think about having affairs or leaving their wives, but they’re right to—their wives are awful. They’re all enamored of, and sexually attracted to, an artist named David Winterbottom, an “artist’s artist.” (“What that really meant was, even though he was in no way famous, some of his friends were.”) David, who some refer to as Mr. New York City, apparently invented “a whole new kind of art,” and the group are mostly concerned with whether he might consider them hicks. These ostensibly virtuous people are deeply vengeful, Machiavellian, and alert to their social standing. They want to win, win, win. Peter, one of the beleaguered male characters, explains:
We don’t understand anything about the dark parts of our own nature. All of those parts are repressed, so of course, when we see those parts of ourselves expressed in another person, we attack. We vanquish the evil in ourselves by exerting control over others, through shaming, shunning, accusation, boycott. And this is the cultural norm right now, for some obvious and relatable reasons.
Butler’s work was never about the millennial workplace or precarity or bullshit jobs or being a modern girl: it was always about power and control. Moddie’s friends are all educated and culturally literate, and several are employed by the local college in administrative positions they feel are beneath their talents. (But what exactly are their talents?) They want power, but I dread to think what they might do with it. They spend a lot of time sending passive-aggressive e-mails and thinking about their friend Bethany, who had an essay published in The New York Times.
Kimberly, perhaps the most memorably furious of the administrators, sends Bethany an e-mail about a get-together that made her feel slighted. In the body of the e-mail she acknowledges that Bethany’s recent think piece “must come with an enormous amount of pressure to be on the national stage in such a way, and I have such sympathy for that.” She closes with:
Thank you for your ear. I hope you’ll bear with me as I learn to cast off the oppressive mantle of culturally learned, gendered interpersonal accommodation in exchange for a perhaps more male but hopefully more open type of directness.
Many of us have learned to speak like this, but what do we want? The same things we’ve always wanted: victory, sympathy, attention. When Moddie opens up about a painful incident in her past, Bethany, exhibiting the calculation that got her that op-ed, advises her, in a monologue that reads like a public relations lecture, on how to navigate it to her maximum advantage. If Moddie follows her advice, Bethany concludes, her enemies “won’t be able to say a single unflattering word about you again. Isn’t that beautiful?” These characters, with their boundaries and their Criterion Channel subscriptions and their hardcover copies of Gloria Steinem’s autobiography, think like Donald Trump.
Moddie has suffered an actual trauma, regardless of how ironically and dismissively she likes to think about it. Alan, a successful artist and friend in Chicago, sexually assaulted her several years ago, and when she told her ex-boyfriend and his clout-chasing pals, she was cast out of their circle—a double betrayal followed by a swift social expulsion. Then, in the last few pages of the book, Moddie gets an e-mail from her father confirming that she has received her money. A begging e-mail from her ex-boyfriend, hoping for a reconciliation, lets the reader know she has inherited around a million dollars. You’ve accidentally read a novel about a member of the leisure class. While you were finding her relatable, if perhaps a tad outré, she was just waiting for the dollars to roll in. Butler’s final punch line is that this windfall doesn’t bring Moddie any joy; she gets more pleasure from finally triumphing over Kimberly. As her ex-boyfriend tells her, “You’re the only person I know who could turn good fortune into torture.”
Butler’s real skill isn’t merely skewering these people—which is a largely self-defeating project—but offering her own, reluctant version of sympathy. Her talent lies in depicting how these sore winners think, and the quiet madness that comes from measuring every interaction in your life by what might be gained in power and status. Like Wharton, she understands the misery of the inheritance class. Not the televisual misery we’re familiar with—private jets, the sprawling, ghostly properties, that obvious shorthand for the rich and spiritually damned. This is the grievous, unshakable misery that takes place in your own head when you can’t connect to anyone or anything. Wealth doesn’t make you free: it makes you a coward. (In The New Me, Millie paces her apartment thinking, “My prison! my home!”) Moddie’s ex-boyfriend accurately surmises her situation when he describes the early days of their relationship:
Maybe when you first get to hell, it seems great for a while, but then time passes and you realize where you are, and it’s all the worse because at first you thought it was exactly what you’d always wanted.
This Issue
February 13, 2025
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She has cowritten two screenplays, Crimes Against Humanity (2014) and Neighborhood Food Drive (2017). ↩