CANR

• The New Me Penguin Books (New York, NY), 2019
• Banal Nightmare: A Novel Random House (New York, NY), 2024

1. Banal nightmare : a novel LCCN 2023044557 Type of material Book Personal name Butler, Halle, author. Main title Banal nightmare : a novel / Halle Butler. Edition First Edition. Published/Produced New York : Random House, 2024. ©2024 Projected pub date 2407 Description 1 online resource ISBN 9780593730379 (ebook) (hardcover) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 2. The yellow wall-paper and other writings LCCN 2020455717 Type of material Book Personal name Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 1860-1935, author. Main title The yellow wall-paper and other writings / Charlotte Perkins Gilman ; introduction by Halle Butler. Edition Modern Library trade paperback edition. Published/Produced New York : Modern Library, 2021. Description xiv, 333 pages ; 21 cm. ISBN 9780593231258 (paperback : acid-free paper) CALL NUMBER PS1744.G57 Y45 2021 FT MEADE Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 3. The new me LCCN 2018029312 Type of material Book Personal name Butler, Halle, author. Main title The new me / Halle Butler. Published/Produced New York, New York : Penguin Books, [2019] Projected pub date 1808 Description 1 online resource. ISBN 9780525505402 (e-book) Item not available at the Library. Why not?

• Los Angeles Review of Books - https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/true-crime-and-self-improvement-an-interview-with-halle-butler-on-the-new-me/

  True Crime and Self-Improvement: An Interview with Halle Butler on “The New Me”
  By Eric FarwellApril 19, 2019
  True Crime and Self-Improvement: An Interview with Halle Butler on “The New Me”
  IN HER TWO NOVELS, 2015’s Jillian and this year’s The New Me, Halle Butler has proved herself to be a capable chronicler of thirtysomething anxiety, depression, and life-happiness negotiation. Both novels focus on female office workers doing their best to compromise between the life they have and the life they wish they could have, even as they internally reject the structures put in place to achieve a given status. In The New Me, Millie, a 30-year-old office temp struggles to compromise between her dreams of economic security and the low-grade depression she’d have to live with to achieve such a goal. Struggling with this compromise causes Millie’s own depression to show through, and Butler’s nuanced handling of that is what makes her one of the more enriching protagonists to read about this year. In the midst of gearing up to promote her new book, Butler found time to email back and forth with me over the span of a few weeks. We were able to cover everything from generational labels to true-crime television in short, but brilliant exchanges.
  ¤

  ERIC FARWELL: Millie, like Jillian in your previous book, is emblematic of a certain kind of cheerful but aimless older millennial archetype. She desperately wants to improve her life, but lacks any real motivation to do so until it’s fairly late in the game for her. What attracts you to this type of protagonist?

  HALLE BUTLER: I’m surprised to hear you compare Millie and Jillian! And to hear you call Millie cheerful. For me, they’re not connected in that way — as being similar archetypes. I think of Millie as an evolution of Megan, if anything. And for a 34-year-old character conceived in 2010, that would make Jillian Gen X. I think way too much emphasis is placed on generational titles, and this kind of tendency to label can walk people away from having a nuanced take on contemporary work. If you think about John Fante’s Ask the Dust, which was published in 1939, you have a character who is perhaps “longing for self-improvement” and “precariously employed” and “self-involved” or whatever millennial stereotype, take your pick, but to read that book through a millennial lens (something no one would do) would be to totally deprive yourself of the beauty of the book. I see Megan and Millie as confused idealists. They reject success through compromise. When Millie sees her options, for example assimilation into consumer culture as a way to find security, she balks and then tries to force herself to become excited by it. I don’t think she “desperately wants to improve her life” in any trite kind of way. I think she’s turned around, grasping at straws, doomed to fail if she refuses to compromise, and doomed in other ways if she does compromise. It’s a stalemate.

  I think I often feel like, “What the hell am I supposed to be doing again?” So that’s probably why I’m drawn to writing about people who are making lamebrained decisions, or are pseudo-valiantly refusing to make decisions, or some combination of that.

  One thing that you do so well in the novel is characterize not only the absurd difference between what Millie believes and what’s true, but also the superiority and nihilistic observations someone like her can armor themselves in as a way to duck responsibility. Yet, you don't push those aspects in a direction that make her unlikable or frustrating. Is managing a character like Millie a tricky thing to balance, or is it easy to portray her because those like her seem so abundant in our lives?

  Oh, the superiority thing, I’m sure this is a side effect of reading too much Greek mythology as a kid, and reading Alan Watts in my 20s. This idea that a person who is lousy or unimportant on the outside can contain something godly on the inside — temporary possession by Hermes or Athena or the universe, the holiness of thoughts, the idea that inside of your own skull you’re the ultimate authority through your power to observe. Any kind of playful, experimental, internal hubris is a great balance to being treated like a depersonalized thing at work, so it’s fun to write. It didn’t feel tricky. The complicated all power/no power arrogance is something I’m pretty comfortable with.

  I wonder what you think is untrue in her observations. One of my original thoughts for the book was: “What if everything you’re worried about is actually true?” Your neighbors are plotting against you, your friends hate you, your boss is trying to fire you, et cetera. I was curious about what kind of intuition you should trust. When is your gut right, and when are you “overthinking”? From one angle, Millie is right about nearly everything — don’t you think?

  I think she’s probably likable because I really like her. I’m basically like her lawyer, presenting her testimony.

  I feel like Millie actually believes she’ll get the job, and the disconnect between her belief and what everyone else observes is interesting. Self-delusion is something we’re all guilty of, but seeing it portrayed on the page lends it both a comedic and sympathetic quality. I think if Millie were a film character, she’d conjure pity, but as someone we’re living along with for the duration of the book, you just relate and cringe.

  I’m not so sure she actually thinks she’ll get the job. I think she’s aware that, in some sense, this is wishful thinking — but it’s wishful thinking for something she doesn’t want at all, which creates a feeling of dread and claustrophobia for her.

  The absence of happiness and accomplishment Millie seems to feel is filled with episodes of Forensic Files. At first, it seems like she just likes the show because it’s an easy enough distraction, but slowly there are these notes of real rage and aggression that emerge in her own narrative. Even one of the later chapters, which details the unkempt state and odor of her apartment, suggests a sense of rotting that wouldn’t be out of place in a true crime show. I was hoping you could walk through how you decided to use the show as a way to crack open these other aspects of Millie’s personality.

  I think I was drawn to using Forensic Files specifically for this idea of true crime being an easy distraction. That somehow someone might find it appropriate to “binge” (I hate that word in the context of TV) real stories of suffering and violence as a pastime. And I noticed that when I would watch Dateline or Forensic Files, I was experiencing boredom. I was interested in that as a background flavor, that kind of callousness and detachment through repeated exposure, and the desire to go back to content that was at one time titillating or frightening or compelling, and how the repetition of the form of Forensic Files can become kind of comforting and friendly to such a degree that one might stop seeing the content. Another thing I was thinking about when I started the book was maybe “apartment thrillers” like Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby, where the space of the home becomes antagonistic, so having this loop of violence and murder in the background, and her occasional thoughts of home invasions (Tom Jordan, Elodie and the dog walker, et cetera) fit that, too. Maybe there’s something about lack of safety going on there.

  I also think it’s common to feel like you’re “in trouble” in some way when you don’t have a lot of money. If you’re worried about credit card payments, account balances, rent, your boss, you can end up feeling kind of criminal, frightened, angry, deviant. So, maybe, it’s partly Millie understanding, subconsciously, that she’s a bit of a social criminal in some ways. I know I’m not totally answering your question.

  The existential patterns of thought Millie gets caught up in, coupled with her erratic behavior, suggest a kind of overlooked mental illness. When writing, was that something you wanted to raise the specter of, or consider in any way?

  I don’t think it’s mentally ill to have existential thoughts, or any kind of philosophical thoughts. This should be the root of a healthy, inquisitive mind. What’s harmful is her isolation.

  As a result of her isolation, maybe, I think she’s given a lot of value and meaning to the idea that she can see what a sham everything is. This is her identity, and I do think it’s very meaningful to her. It’s tragic because it doesn’t do anything for her — this identity of the judgmental outsider almost guarantees misery, but it’s all she has. (I also think this is where a lot of the depression humor comes from, since she’s sort of “friends” with her depression, if that makes sense.)

  Obviously, she has very bleak thoughts, but it wasn’t my intention to make this a book about depression. To do that would put Millie at a distance, square her away with a label, which is definitely not what I was aiming for.

  I should clarify: existential thought patterns aren’t a sign of mental illness in general, but I think of the scene where Millie is on the phone with her mother, and seems to have some kind of odd, dissociative breakdown about personhood and labels. This, mixed with her verbal commentary at the party, and the underpins of anger are what got me thinking about mental illness. I don’t think Millie is “crazy” or anything, just maybe overlooked, or doing a poor job of taking care and stock of her mental anguish. I think most people are like Millie at different times in their lives.

  Sure, it would be stubborn of me to try to say that she’s taking great care of herself. From the perspective of writing her, I’m seeing her very much as a specific person who I feel a lot of sympathy for, rather than as a vehicle to talk about an issue. That’s what I mean when I say I wasn’t trying to raise any issue about mental health with the book. And yes, even Millie’s like Millie at certain times in her life.

  As you've been crafting her, what has Millie come to mean to you? It’s not unusual for a writer to get attached to a protagonist, but has the value of Millie, or the realness of Millie, shifted as you’ve spent more time with her?

  I’m intensely attached to all of my characters. When people want to talk to me about characters in Jillian, I totally forget I wrote it. Especially if they want to talk about Elena, my favorite. I’ll find myself saying, “Yeah, that part is hilarious,” or some variation, and then I feel embarrassed because I wrote it, and the appropriate response is something more along the lines of: “Oh, thank you!” Maybe the further away from writing a book I get, the better I think the book is. I definitely felt like Jillian and The New Me totally sucked the first time I read them — but now I think they’re pretty good.

  In reading, I kept thinking about the opening chapter of Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot, or any section of Claire Messud’s The Emperor's Children, which are very clearly drawn-out scenes. When you were developing The New Me, did you envision it in chapters that functioned as the easily imagined scenes you have, or did it have more grandiose plotting that you boiled down for pacing and plot economy?

  I haven’t read either of those books, but I really liked The Woman Upstairs — I’m sure that’s no surprise. I write everything in order, each scene is in response to the last. I’ll have a few ideas for things that could “happen” in the book that I’m sort of leading up to, or keeping in the back of my mind while I’m writing, but I don’t do very much outlining (if this is what you mean by developing). I think when I got a little more than halfway through I did a retroactive outline of the first half, partly just so I could remember what I’d written, and have a shorthand list of scenes to glance at. I think, naturally, you have to have a kind of grandiose feeling about any project you start — like, “This is going to be the best book ever written,” which is, of course, impossible — and the writing gets better, flows more easily, once you stop caring so much about the outcome (in my experience, anyway). I knew I wanted the plot to be a slow deflation, things getting a little bit worse, a little bit worse, day by day, but other than that, I wasn’t too focused on structure — structural concerns for me usually happen in the edit. Most of (but not all of!) my writing and planning happens subconsciously, through doing.

  The ostensible “antagonist” of the book, Karen the receptionist, seems no happier than Millie, but is overeager in her position to advance. In some ways, it’s easy to consider her as a sort of bizarro Millie, but not necessarily one that is more successful or correct than Millie. It’s tempting to read this contrast a sort of commentary on how ambition doesn’t always equate to success or joy, but I was hoping you could speak to what you see Karen’s function as in the novel.

  I was seeing Karen as the villain. Her ambition makes her wicked — ambition almost never equates to joy, especially if your ambition is authority or status (even on a small scale). The scene where she’s thinking about what it would take, financially, to replace Millie is very heartless. She should just talk to Millie — but she has all of these money/status/title justifications for why she “can’t.” She’s treating Millie like a thing, a problem, not like a person — and she gets a small dose of this herself near the end. This kind of passive aggressive mindset/dynamic is really common in offices. People are overwhelmed and feel threatened and like they have something to prove, something to lose, possibly something to gain (even if the only thing they’re gaining is feeling like they’re not threatened, and have finally moved past the “proof” part of their careers), so I do feel some small sympathy for Karen. She’s supposed to be a threat to Millie and an illustration of a kind of office, ladder-climbing mindset — maybe the kind of mindset that Millie is “supposed to” have.

  I know you spoke to the idea of labels earlier, but I still am curious about your specific feelings. You’ve been kind of labeled as the writer capturing the millennial experience, and I’m curious what you make of that. Do designations like that carry any weight for you, or make you feel boxed-in in terms of what you cover as a writer?

  I feel like Millie is reacting to a lot of external information about what she should and shouldn’t do, feel, be, et cetera, and she’s comparing that information with the experience she’s having of being alive. There’s this great anecdote in William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, where a Quaker is wondering if he should wear undyed, white fur and fabric. On one hand, he doesn’t believe he should wear dyed fabrics — they hide the dirt, it’s an embellishment to use dye — but on the other hand, undyed, white fabric and fur is in fashion, and he doesn’t want anyone to think he’s being vain or trying to look fashionable. He has a total meltdown about it. These are the kinds of things I like to think about — expectations versus realities, internal versus presentation, and how can one find or make meaning in their lives, when the experience of life is a rapidly moving target. If what I’ve written resonates with some people, I think this is a very lucky accident, and it’s very meaningful to me to be able to communicate that way. Also, on page two, one of the co-workers says something about looking like a hipster, which really dates the book to 2016 — this is how fast things move. I wasn’t thinking about millennials at the time, and I’d rather people approach the book fresh, respond to the content without any expectations, draw their own meaning (or not! that’s fine, too) from the direct experience of the read. You know, the same way you should approach life. [Laughs.]
  ¤

  Eric Farwell is an adjunct professor of English at Monmouth University and Ocean County College in New Jersey. His writing has appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle, Esquire, Salon, GQ, Slice (forthcoming), Ploughshares, the Paris Review Daily, The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, the Village Voice, Vanity Fair, The Believer, and Guernica.
  LARB CONTRIBUTOR

  Eric Farwell is an adjunct professor of English at Monmouth University and Ocean County College in New Jersey. His writing has appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle, Esquire, Salon, GQ, Slice (forthcoming), Ploughshares, the Paris Review Daily, The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, the Village Voice, Vanity Fair, The Believer, and Guernica.

• The Cut - https://www.thecut.com/2019/03/profile-halle-butler-author-of-the-new-me.html

  BOOKS MAR. 6, 2019
  What Do Halle Butler’s Women Want?
  By Sylvie McNamara
  Photograph By Miranda Barnes

  Photo: Miranda Barnes
  In 2017, at a party for the literary magazine Granta, a man from Knopf asked Halle Butler what she does. “A lot of people seemed to think I was someone’s drunk date or something,” Butler recalls, so she leaned into it, telling him she was a secretary. This wasn’t explicitly false — for a long time, Butler had been making a paltry living doing clerical work through a temp agency. But it was a blatant lie of omission. Halle Butler was one of the writers being honored by the magazine’s Best of Young American Novelists issue, alongside luminaries such as Ben Lerner, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Yaa Gyasi. Maybe the darkest horse in the herd, Butler had neither a literary reputation nor connections; Granta’s editors found her 2015 debut Jillian, a manic tragicomedy about two self-destructive office administrators, in their slush pile.

  If you met Halle Butler today, you’d probably be in the same position as the man from Knopf: she wouldn’t tell you that she’s a writer. Instead, she might regale you with war stories from her terrible jobs (the time a supervisor took her crutches, made her hop around on a hurt foot, and then fired her because her hair looked bad), without mentioning the novel these stories inspired: The New Me, a comic psychodrama about an incompetent temp worker, which is out this month. A 33-year-old native of Bloomington, Illinois, who came of age in Chicago, Butler’s modesty reflects a Midwestern aversion to self-promotion that’s hardened by her loathing of money and status. “Careerism and consumerism are not necessarily great bedfellows with art,” she tells me, understating a point that she later makes more starkly: “I would never write for money. Because that’s gross. Because I hate money!”

  It’s risky to make moral pronouncements like these to a stranger, especially one who is literally writing about you for money. But I feel less judged than held to account. I’m from the Midwest, too, and Butler — who has flyaway curls, a dark, formless sweater, and a face so angular it’s borderline cubist — reminds me of the aspects of New York that once galled me. Over tea in her snug Alphabet City apartment, she brings up the phrase “you sold your book,” which she finds repulsive, a naked embrace of commerce. I’d never heard anyone say “sold your book” before I moved to New York, but I say it now without thinking. Living in the orbit of blue chip galleries and the Big Five publishing houses, you get warped by their gravity, by the twinned chimeras of money and institutional validation. These days I rarely speak to anyone so genuinely indifferent to all of that.

  In writing about what is upsetting to me personally anti-capitalist stuff just comes out.
  Butler has spent her whole life prioritizing “personal freedom and art and expression and intuition.” In practical terms, this has meant eschewing a traditional career and working a series of menial jobs in exchange for the flexibility and brain space to pursue her writing. Butler has sold DVDs over the phone, washed dishes at a strip-mall café, answered phones in a doctor’s office, and done administrative work at banks, ad agencies, and conferences, all while co-writing two independent feature films (Crimes Against Humanity in 2014 and Neighborhood Food Drive in 2017) and publishing two novels.

  Butler’s fiction is preoccupied by the conflict between individuality and contemporary capitalism, how the imperative to work for money domesticates passion and sucks meaning from our lives. With deadpan humor, her characters shred unimportant documents, assemble junk mailers (termed “welcome packets”), bristle on phone calls, and sublimate anger into violent fantasy. These are middle-class college grads, presumably white, who seem not to be in debt — the deck is stacked in their favor, but they can nevertheless only find degrading, suffocating work. Their commentary is withering: Millie, the disgruntled temp who narrates The New Me, observes that a co-worker is “wrapped up in some distraction so utterly meaningless that it should, if she reflected on it, shake her to her core.” The anti-hero of Jillian tells her boyfriend, “What? I’m in a dead-end job, this is what it means to be in a dead-end job. I face death.”

  Imagine if Ottessa Moshfegh had been the head writer of a low-rent version of Girls, or if Whit Stillman and George Orwell co-wrote a gig-economy comedy of manners starring a jaded Emma Bovary, and you can sort of picture what Butler is up to. The women Butler writes are simultaneously neurotic and corporeal, interrupting their incandescent shame spirals to drunkenly vomit, burp, or scrub their “fetid cracks” in the shower. They’re smart but ungenerous (“she continues to be a thick strand in the malevolent web of my daily routine,” one says of another), and rightfully paranoid: their bosses are planning to fire them, their friends are all talking shit, and they have nothing to look forward to. From the frenetic mental chatter of people in crisis, Butler crafts a noxious brew of social anxiety and self-loathing, tempered only by her black humor and genuine affection for viciousness and disgust.

  Writing about drones breaking their minds in the capitalist beehive is clearly personal to Halle Butler — she has worked their jobs and thought their thoughts. But in trying to parse how much of her work is explicitly political, I use the term “class warfare,” and she looks at me askance. “I’m going to smoke a cigarette,” Butler tells me, laughing, “and then I’ll answer your question about class warfare.” Her tone bends at the end, nasal and sardonic, without being mean. I ask if there’s a better term. “Yeah,” she says. “I think we can bring it way down.” Butler never returns to “class warfare”; instead, when she’s done smoking on her fire escape, she answers my question by pivoting to her own experiences. “In writing about what is upsetting to me personally,” she says, “anti-capitalist stuff just comes out.”

  At an early age, Butler understood institutions and authority figures to be a threat to her individuality. In third grade, a teacher scolded her for reading out loud with “too much color” in her voice, from which Butler intuited that the purpose of school was to “learn how to defer and complete the worksheet.” She refused to do this, and her high-school GPA bottomed out at 1.9. After graduating, Butler enrolled at an art school in Cleveland to study drawing and printmaking, but that didn’t work, either. She dropped out and later transferred to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago — a less rigid institution — from which she graduated with a creative-writing degree in that dreaded Year of Our Lord, 2008.

  Of entering the workforce during the Great Recession, Butler has little to say. “It was pretty similar to my experiences of everything else, in that it just wasn’t working out.” For her whole life, she had felt precarious, rejected, and unsuccessful, so the recession didn’t rock her — she had never assumed she would have a career-track job, anyway. But this didn’t make earning money more palatable. Keeping the seat warm at various desk jobs incubated the kind of boredom that liquefies brain matter, and she filled her hours by shopping online, googling “people who I felt had slighted me at parties,” and ostentatiously listening to Zizek lectures. “I know I need to stuff these envelopes and I’ll do it,” she would think, “but I cannot believe that this is what the rest of my life is going to be like.”

  I still think I might temp again, as a way to take pressure off of writing for money.
  Stalked by this dread, Butler decided that she had to write a novel before she was 25, so she saved a little money, quit her job as an administrator in a doctor’s office, and spent the last month of her 24th year writing the first draft of Jillian. A little baffled, I clarify that she wrote a novel in a month to prove to herself that she should pursue a writing career, and she corrects me: “No, I wasn’t thinking of it as a career.” I should have known. If critical acclaim translated to financial success, Jillian’s publication might have liberated Butler from bouncing between office jobs, but it didn’t. Instead, the novel gave her exactly what she sought: affirmation that she was a writer.

  When I first emailed Butler, I asked for lists of what she’d been reading when she wrote Jillian and The New Me. They’re eclectic: Patricia Highsmith, mythology, pickup artist forums, Bukowski, tracts from the occult bookstore, Joyce, Charlotte Brontë, true-crime, Google results for “how to feel better,” Jean Rhys, and the Ask a Manager blog. But she also notes that art school — and its emphasis on learning to “observe and relax and evoke accurately” — perhaps influenced her more than reading. This makes sense. Butler’s exquisite rendering of familiar, distressing thought processes is perhaps the standout element of her fiction. Her novels echo the best of contemporary autofiction, but Butler avoids that genre’s pitfalls: the studied precociousness, the preening, and the inbent focus on frustrated creatives.

  As another major influence, Butler cites the TV show, Columbo, a ’70s detective drama about a scrappy police lieutenant thwarting wealthy and arrogant murderers. Butler likes Columbo’s “torches and pitchforks” class politics — the perpetual humiliation of the rich at the hands of a blue-collar detective — but her own fiction is less sanguine about the triumph of labor in the post-recession age. Ten years after the stock market’s fateful swan dive, scores of millennials still feel its effects: the recession gutted their young adulthood, leaving them with Sisyphean debts, a string of gigs rather than a steady career, and a sense of having been lied to about the nature of adult life. To be sure, Butler’s protagonists are better off than most, but they nonetheless embody an experience familiar to many of their generation: being under-engaged at work, condescended to, and financially unstable. They’re not building a career or a family or even pursuing hobbies on the side — they’re just subsisting and wondering why the future they were promised has never arrived.

  Butler clarifies that the happy ending for her characters would not be career success, but rather discovering a sense of personal meaning. (This is part of why her novels are rooted in Chicago rather than New York: the New York happy ending, Butler insists, would be inevitably careerist.) And while Butler has long found personal meaning in her writing, she has suddenly found professional success, too. By her own standards, this puts her in a somewhat compromised position. After all, even though she didn’t write The New Me with the intention to make money — and in fact wrote it as an “indictment of bourgeois ideology” — she’s now living off her book advance (plus some cash from adjuncting at Columbia) in one of the most expensive cities in America. Butler isn’t self-flagellating or defensive about the appearance that she’s now mingling art with commerce, maybe because she doesn’t assume it will last. “I still think I might temp again,” she says, “as a way to take pressure off of writing for money.” She then reminds me once more that writing for money is something she thinks “one ought not ever do.”

  Admittedly, the idea of Butler returning to temp work bums me out. But then I think of Columbo sauntering around in a rumpled trench coat, asking faux-naive questions of his wealthy suspects. In the midst of condescending to him, these assholes always hang themselves with sloppy mistakes. “You can really identify with him if you’re working in a shitty job,” Butler says. “If you spend a large amount of your time being depersonalized, you can say, ‘Yes, I might have fucked-up, messy hair, but I am watching you.’”

  I imagine Butler at the Granta party claiming to be a secretary, or answering phones again after her book money runs out, and I’m relieved that she’s there, observing. After all, at the end of each episode, Columbo puts the rich guy in handcuffs; at the end of Butler’s tedious jobs, the system that put her there ends up on the page.

• The Paris Review - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/03/05/i-a-novelist-an-interview-with-halle-butler/

  QUOTED: "The entirety of the experience informed both books. The number one thing people do not want to have to hear you talk about is how much you hate your job. It’s so boring. But it’s also the thing that you can’t stop talking about. All anyone can say is, like, Oh, wow, that sucks, or, more infuriatingly, Maybe you should stop thinking [read: talking] about it."
  "So part of the fun for me was being able to wild out on how horrible and sad and lonely this kind of work is. It was a very complicated and indirect way to communicate that I’m sad and this sucks."
  I was thinking about the term toxic as it relates to people and friendships, and how that relates to self-improvement. Identifying and eliminating toxic people was kind of a craze in 2015, 2016. I’m toxic, I need to eat mushroom powder, my friend is toxic, I need to put up a boundary. I was thinking of Millie as a toxic person, but one with a very good argument."

  I, a Novelist: An Interview with Halle Butler
  By Patrick Cottrell March 5, 2019AT WORK

  HALLE BUTLER (PHOTO: JERZY ROSE)

  I, a novelist, met novelist Halle Butler in Chicago in May 2017. My girlfriend, also a novelist, was reading with Butler at a café in Logan Square. Halle was standing outside with her friend, a novelist, and they were smoking cigarettes. Butler had on a wrinkled button-down shirt from a thrift store, dirty sneakers, and jeans with holes in them. She seemed wry and friendly. At the time, I don’t think she was aware I was a novelist, but as we talked, I couldn’t stop myself from referring to my debut novel, which had come out a couple months earlier. She smiled in a conspiratorial way, then told me she would have trouble remembering the title because she was already drunk. My girlfriend and I were hungry, so we went inside and ordered gumbo. Halle got up to read an excerpt from her novel-in-progress, The New Me (Penguin). She burped a few times, then announced she was a Granta Best Young American Novelist. Everyone laughed when her narrator admits she is “afraid of the taste of water.” I wondered, who is this Halle Butler person?

  I wanted to become her friend immediately. This would be a good place for me to describe, in summary, Butler’s new novel, The New Me, but I hesitate to say that it’s about loneliness, alienation, depression, and friendship. I will say that I experienced waves of empathy for her narrator and her narrator’s anxiety sweat. The New Me is a bold and absurd work of comic genius that dissects social mores, neoliberalism, and consumerism disguised as self-improvement. In other words, Butler and I are kindred spirits and I’m so grateful to have become her friend (when she’s not making fun of me).

  INTERVIEWER

  First of all, thank you for writing such a beautiful, enraged treatise on living alone in an apartment in Chicago in the winter with one quasi friend and a terrible job. Where did this book begin for you?

  BUTLER

  I assure you the pleasure was all mine.

  I wrote the first few chapters specifically to perform aloud—the intro/overture part, the train scene, the Tom Jordan part. I really like doing readings, but I felt like I’d never totally cracked the code for how to keep people from glazing over, which is definitely a common thing at a reading—getting and keeping people’s attention is really hard, unless they already know you—which, in my case, is often. So I tried first person, lots of potshots, language that would allow me to read in my “irate idiot” party voice. I like it when you feel like you’re witnessing someone interacting with their work in front of you, rather than some kind of self-conscious performance of a reading, if that makes sense. I read the first handful of pages of The New Me at Cafe Mustache in Chicago, in 2016.

  INTERVIEWER

  Everyone dreads talking about their writing process. Why does everyone dread this? What does an hour of writing look like for you? A minute of writing? Nonwriting?

  BUTLER

  Very few people have ever asked me about my process. I guess it’s a balance of trying to stay relaxed and attentive, right?

  The first draft is typing casually, almost in a conversational way, responding to a series of ideas, seeing where that leads, paying attention to what feels natural, what’s funny, what’s sad, what’s stimulating, what passes the time. And then there’s editing, which is more like interactive reading, starting at the top, stopping when you need to make a change, then going to the top again, until you can read it through without anything standing out. It’s pretty simple. Sometimes it feels forced, but that’s no big deal.

  I think Bukowski’s really funny on process. “So you want to be a writer” and “air and light and time and space” are really great diss poems. And I also really love Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, particularly the part about the cobbler’s elves. Do you know this book?

  INTERVIEWER

  I haven’t read it, but have heard of it.

  BUTLER

  It’s intensely comforting. It accurately describes the feeling of being inspired, of how you can work at something for a while and then suddenly everything clicks into place. Oh, it’s so good! When I want to feel reassured, I think about Lewis Hyde, and when I want to feel more “fuck you,” I read something like “air and light and time and space”. But they’re both about how you can’t really pin down or commodify the artistic experience.

  Maybe artists dread the process question because it seems sort of beside the point or hard to answer properly. The answer is something like, I really have no clue what I’m doing, but I like doing it.

  INTERVIEWER

  Millie, your narrator, is isolated and lonely, yet surrounded by other people in her workspaces and her apartment building. Can you talk about the relationship between Millie and the city?

  BUTLER

  I wasn’t really thinking about the city as the source of the isolation. I was thinking more about where a drained, isolated person would turn for connection or advice—and I think they would google it. But the advice you get on the internet is the shallow, lifestyle kind, which feels like a coastal import. Or you turn to TV, which really blanks out your mind with simulated human interaction. We know that Millie has cultural interests: her parents are academic, she used to work at a museum, she’s interested in ballet and opera, she has philosophical thoughts. So maybe one of the ironies is that, of course, a person with these interests would want to live near one of the best museums in the world, walking distance from the Poetry Foundation, the Civic Opera House, et cetera, et cetera, but she just can’t seem to shut the fuck up and go look at some Cézannes. There’s something about the internalized Protestant work ethic going on there, that a pleasure can’t be enjoyed for its own sake, that it has to lead somewhere else—even if that somewhere is just a moral feeling. Millie has difficulty with this. And what happens to a person who, for years, has spent time developing their critical and artistic sensitivities, and then they lose the institutional support of school, lose their community after a break up, lose the opportunity to have a meaningful career as a result of scarcity and inertia, and find themselves in a cubicle? That person will naturally go a little cuckoo. I’m not trying to say that if only she went to look at some paintings, she’d be cured. There’s just a taint to everything.

  INTERVIEWER

  I’m interested in Millie’s hostility. In The New Me there are long, digressive tangents in which Millie examines and surgically dissects social cues and other forms of politeness. She’s an observer of the world around her, yet she doesn’t spare herself from this examination.

  BUTLER

  Hostility is definitely my main ingredient. It’s a muscle I’ve spent some time developing. But then there’s guilt and shame, too. I’m not sure exactly how to answer this. I mean, she’s kind of like a weasel in a bag—that’s not an expression, it’s just something to picture. She’s the weasel and she’s the bag. I don’t know, Patrick. Maybe society is the bag. I’ve just had this experience of being really hard on myself when I’m sad, and then you know, I pity the poor soul who says the wrong thing around me, because I just kind of whip pan over to them and charge. Mentally, of course. They never know that now they’re a figure in my psychodrama. I think it’s very likely that the starting point for Millie’s hostility was a vivid sense that she was doing something wrong—and then when that became exhausting, she turned it outward. You know what I’m talking about, right?

  INTERVIEWER

  Of course I do. Your debut novel, Jillian, used the office as a space of rage, fantasy, and disappointment. What’s your relationship to the workplace, if there is one? I don’t want to assume…

  BUTLER

  I’ve worked mainly as a secretary or in customer service.

  INTERVIEWER

  I’m curious—did a specific experience from your workplace inform The New Me and Jillian?

  BUTLER

  The entirety of the experience informed both books. The number one thing people do not want to have to hear you talk about is how much you hate your job. It’s so boring. But it’s also the thing that you can’t stop talking about. All anyone can say is, like, Oh, wow, that sucks, or, more infuriatingly, Maybe you should stop thinking [read: talking] about it. So part of the fun for me was being able to wild out on how horrible and sad and lonely this kind of work is. It was a very complicated and indirect way to communicate that I’m sad and this sucks.

  INTERVIEWER

  In alternating chapters, there are breaks from Millie’s first-person narration where we enter the close third person of Millie’s supervisor, her coworkers, neighbors, et cetera. It creates this grotesque ecosystem of despair and sadness. These outside perspectives also offer insight into how others view Millie, which I think is brilliant.

  BUTLER

  It was a way to take a breather from the monologue and to confirm some of Millie’s suspicions.

  They all have more than Millie does—goals, friends—and their concerns are all a little frivolous, so I’m definitely making fun of those characters a little bit. I wish I had a better answer, like, structurally my intent was to have those sections function as a break in the same way that one might take a break from something stressful by checking their iPhone, and since the iPhone and the internet are less intense simulacrums of interpersonal relationships, it made sense for me to not use first person, et cetera, et cetera, but that would be a lie. I was just trying to make myself laugh. Does that answer satisfy you? [Laughs.]

  INTERVIEWER

  Thank you for satisfying me, Halle. Speaking of the grotesque, we both as writers sometimes go a little too far in our writing in terms of describing bodily functions. How do you know when something is too much?

  BUTLER

  There’s a lot of anxiety sweat in The New Me—I think this is what you mean. I remember when I put it together that my sweat smelled worse when I was stressed out—I thought that was really interesting. Like a defense mechanism, like, Okay, everybody take three big steps back, because I can’t handle any more right now! Like a skunk, or those caterpillars that smell like almonds when you shake them. There’s something really vulnerable and pathetic about it. To picture Millie walking around the office smelling like an onion pizza—based on a true odor—just radiating distress in a way that’s bound to be interpreted as repulsive and sloppy … it endeared me to her.

  INTERVIEWER

  The title of your novel, The New Me, suggests a promise of reinvention. Could you say something about our culture in which a person is expected to better herself, whether through diet, fitness, plastic surgery, education, therapy?

  BUTLER

  With this book, these concerns were pretty internal. I often have this sense that there’s something wrong—I’m sad or I feel vaguely guilty about something, something’s just off. So I come up with a rational solution, for example, to eat well or to read a certain book that might stimulate me, because I can remember feeling good, and I associate those feelings with health and interesting thinking. But it can be hard to do the rational thing, because that takes a little will and a little energy—pizza and TV take no energy. So I say, Okay, I’ll do it tomorrow. But I don’t. And then I start to feel like I’m procrastinating, and then I feel guilty about that, which drains more energy, and as these feelings start to snowball, they become more ornate, they become related to my opinions of myself on an almost moral level, thinking that I’m bad, and the whole thing gets out of hand. It’s very baroque and emotional. Indecision and anguish over nothing. I think these feelings are pretty eternal—promising to be better, promising to be more moral, and then the difficulty of following through.

  People know about this feeling, especially people who want to sell you something (The New Me, Penguin, $16). There’s a lot of snake oil out there, now and always, and I definitely have disdain for people who manipulate someone’s emotions and vulnerability for profit (audible.com, read by the author). It might be a distraction to think of this as a uniquely contemporary problem.

  The idea that if you can commodify an experience, somehow that’s better, more useful, than pure experience feels really bogus. Walking is such a pleasure, but with a pedometer, the pleasure becomes monitoring the stats of walking, with the end goal of looking slimmer, so that people treat you better, et cetera. You’re cut off from the pleasure of walking. Or, I think about that company Moon Juice, which is focused on a holistic, sustainable approach to health, with all the trappings of a kind of spiritual-feminine connection to nature and the body, using mushrooms and herbs and things, but, you know, with products like that, what you get is the pleasure of the purchase. It doesn’t matter if the product lives up to its wild promises of reinvention. You already get to feel consumer relief and superiority.

  I was thinking about the term toxic as it relates to people and friendships, and how that relates to self-improvement. Identifying and eliminating toxic people was kind of a craze in 2015, 2016. I’m toxic, I need to eat mushroom powder, my friend is toxic, I need to put up a boundary. I was thinking of Millie as a toxic person, but one with a very good argument.

  INTERVIEWER

  What would you say is her argument?

  BUTLER

  That to accept the world as it is, and to become soothed by conveyor-belt, good-school-to-good-retirement-home, status-seeking consumerism would be a kind of spiritual death.

  Patrick Cottrell is the author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace. He is the winner of a 2018 Whiting Award in fiction and a Barnes and Noble Discover Award.

• Wikipedia -

  Halle Butler

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  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Halle Butler (born 1985) is an American author. She grew up in Bloomington, Illinois and lives in Chicago. After co-writing two independent films, Butler published her first novel, Jillian in 2015. Her second novel, The New Me was released in 2019. Butler was recognised as one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists and honored as one of the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35.

  Early life and education
  Originally from Bloomington, Illinois, Butler graduated with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2008.[1][2] As of 2017, Butler was living in Chicago.[3]

  Career
  Whilst working in a succession of menial jobs, Halle Butler co-wrote two independent films, Crimes against Humanity (2014) and Neighborhood Food Drive (2017).[2] She released her first novel Jillian in 2015. The plot concerns the obsession of 24-year-old Megan with her 35-year-old co-worker Jillian.[4][5] Butler published her second novel The New Me in 2019. It follows a temporary worker called Millie as she goes from job to job. Writing in The Guardian Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett called it "depressing" and "bleakly funny".[6] Writing for The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino described it as a "definitive work of millennial literature".[7] Her next novel, Banal Nightmare, will be published by Random House on July 16, 2024.[8]

  Published works
  Jillian, Curbside Splendor, 2015. ISBN 978-1940430294
  The New Me, Penguin Books, 2019. ISBN 978-1474612296
  Banal Nightmare, Random House, 2024. ISBN 9780593730355
  Awards and honors
  Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists of 2017[9]
  National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree[3][1]

QUOTED: "I wanted it to be painful to read while also being funny at times. This is another thing that I thought was an interesting match about dead-end jobs and depression, and that's this feeling of endlessness and also complete lack of energy. One of the symptoms of depression or one of the feelings of depression is when you're depressed, you remember that you've always been depressed. And you predict that you always will be depressed. And I think the same feelings come out when work isn't going well, too. I will always have this terrible job."

To listen to this broadcast, click here:

Play Audio
HOST: AILSA CHANG

AILSA CHANG: How many of us have felt, at some point in our work lives, stuck in dead-end jobs, where the work we were doing was unimaginative and soul-sucking, where the purpose was - well, what was the purpose anyway? Writer Halle Butler has had her share of those experiences working as a temp.

HALLE BUTLER: I had one job where I went into a file room. And it was maybe 15 by 15 feet. And it was filled floor to ceiling with old documents that I was supposed to shred. And the whole thing had kind of a feeling of, you know, the beginning of the Rumplestiltskin fairy tale, where you're - she has to spin all this stuff into gold, except I was creating garbage.

CHANG: In her new book "The New Me," Butler explores how paralyzing a terrible job can be. Her story focuses on a 30-year-old woman named Millie, who wanders from temp job to temp job. She's a character you really don't want to see yourself in but you kind of do. And that's where I started when I spoke with Halle Butler earlier.

BUTLER: Sometimes, I refer to her as kind of a gremlin.

(LAUGHTER)

BUTLER: She's like this all-knowing gremlin. On the inside, she has this really ornate way of describing the world around her. And she's very judgmental. And she's very hostile and - almost in a Dickensian sense. She really takes a lot of pleasure in describing the faults of others. But it makes her feel bad because she can't have any friends, and she can't, you know, do anything good for herself.

CHANG: On the outside, it's like she fades into the background. She seems like someone who realizes that she's forgettable. I mean...

BUTLER: Yes.

CHANG: ...When you just meet her in, say, the coffee room or something. And she takes that to heart, but she doesn't do anything to change that.

BUTLER: Yeah. What's she supposed to do? Hi. How are you doing? I'm Millie. I've been thinking about how much I hate you for three months.

(LAUGHTER)

CHANG: I mean, there's so many scenes in this book that capture the stupid, pointless things that we swallow to get along in the workplace. Like, Millie just willingly submits herself to all of that. There's this moment where she's being shown how to use a paper clip.

BUTLER: (Laughter).

CHANG: Big side on the bottom, little side on the top - and she's like, OK. That makes sense, like, you know, like, very dutifully. What was it that you were trying to depict in that scene?

BUTLER: I imagine her on the outside, being like, oh, yeah, totally. That makes sense.

CHANG: Right.

BUTLER: But then on the inside, being like...

CHANG: Are you kidding me?

BUTLER: Yes, I will do this. Are you kidding? So that tension - and it's a tension that sort of ends up infecting her body, too. Her shoulders are always tight. She's always hunching. And it's these little things that just sort of ratchet her up. So I wanted that tension between the outside and the inside, if that makes sense.

CHANG: Right. On the outside, she seems so compliant, so agreeable, so placid. On the inside, she's furious and sad and frustrated.

BUTLER: Yeah. And I think through - as the book goes on, the inside stuff starts to come out a little bit more. I mean, I think it's left intentionally a little washy. But she does - I mean, her grooming isn't all that great near the end, you know? Like, it does - all the lines kind of start to bleed.

CHANG: Yeah. So she's kind of like just continuing almost in a daze. And then she finds this new surge of energy when the possibility of a promotion arrives. There's this checklist in her head of what a better life would represent. It means new clothes, more vegetables. It means yoga. And then that, ultimately, proves to be this hollow fantasy, doesn't it?

BUTLER: Yeah. I think there's something manic and performative about her enthusiasm for integrating into this Instacart online shopping...

CHANG: For the groceries.

BUTLER: ...For the groceries, yeah.

CHANG: It's like she has this picture in her head of what other people are aspiring to. And she's like, all right. I'll just, like, make a checklist of those things. And...

BUTLER: I'll try it. Maybe it'll help (laughter).

CHANG: Yeah, yeah - you know, like fake it till you make it kind of thing.

BUTLER: Yeah, yeah. But fake it till you make it - but also, I'm thinking now that there's something about the why of the work that's underscored in that act of hers. It's not, good. Maybe I'd have more responsibilities. Maybe my work would become more fulfilling in and of itself. The reason to do work in the world of this book is only so you can have money, so that you can buy...

CHANG: Right.

BUTLER: ...A cardigan.

CHANG: And go to yoga classes.

BUTLER: And go to yoga classes.

CHANG: Right. Work is just a way to get those things that other people seem to want.

BUTLER: Yeah.

CHANG: This book is also or, maybe, really a story about depression and how the simplest things can feel so insurmountable when someone's struggling with depression. I mean, Millie has to psych herself up to clean her apartment, to wash herself, to make herself look nice, to get herself out of the door. It was painful to read.

BUTLER: Good.

(LAUGHTER)

BUTLER: Yeah, that's what - I wanted it to be painful to read while also being funny at times. This is another thing that I thought was an interesting match about dead-end jobs and depression, and that's this feeling of endlessness and also complete lack of energy. One of the symptoms of depression or one of the feelings of depression is when you're depressed, you remember that you've always been depressed. And you predict that you always will be depressed. And I think the same feelings come out when work isn't going well, too. I will always have this terrible job.

CHANG: Yeah.

BUTLER: I've always been terrible. I'll always be terrible. I was interested in fusing those two things.

CHANG: I mean, we should point out that this book is really, really funny. And a lot of our conversation has made it sound like the story's incredibly depressing and dour and just a killjoy, but it's not. I was laughing throughout the book, too.

BUTLER: Good. You know, it's what helps the medicine go down or something.

(LAUGHTER)

CHANG: So are you writing full time now? Are you a full-time novelist?

BUTLER: That question makes me so nervous.

CHANG: (Laughter).

BUTLER: But I'll answer it. I have been able to take time off from temping because of the book. I just started writing something new. And also, I'm teaching. And so I'm teaching and writing mostly now.

CHANG: Well, that segues nicely into my next question. Has your conception of adulthood and what success should look like changed?

BUTLER: My conception of adulthood maybe but not my ideas about success - I still feel skeptical of ambition.

CHANG: Really?

BUTLER: Yeah.

CHANG: Why?

BUTLER: Something about it seems to miss the point of how we should experience life. It's helpful to have goals to work towards. And it's good to be working on a project that has inherent meaning and to have relationships that have inherent meaning. But if your goal is to get status or achieve something, you might fail. And then you'll feel terrible or you'll always be approaching situations with that in the back of your mind. And it'll really sour your experience and stress you out.

And I just kind of want to be que sera sera about it. But also, I would like to, you know, be an adult. I don't know. I'd like to feel a little more in control of things. But it's - I'm thinking about it.

CHANG: Halle Butler's new book is called "The New Me." Thank you very much for joining us.

BUTLER: It was my pleasure. Thank you.

(SOUNDBITE OF 80'S CHILD SONG, "I CAN'T WAIT")

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions page at www.npr.org for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.
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"'The New Me' Is Meh About Ambition And Adulthood." All Things Considered, 19 Mar. 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A580047932/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=336a9677. Accessed 27 June 2024.

QUOTED: "Butler is a sharp and observant writer, who takes to task the tragicomedy of modern capitalism."

The New Me

Halle Butler. Penguin, $16 trade paper (208p) ISBN 978-0-14-313360-5

Butler's incisive latest (following Jillian) opens in winter in Chicago, where 30-year-old Millie is sweating inside her coat as she rides the crowded train ro her temp position at the Lisa Hopper interior design showroom, where the uptight senior receptionist Karen calls her Maddie, and she gets paid $12 an hour ro clip together mailers and answer the phone. Millie's life is deeply stagnant--besides her temp position, she has one awful friend named Sarah, little to no social life, and a deep dependency on the crime show Forensic Files, which she watches nightly. It's clear to Millie that something must change. When she receives an innocuous email from her temp agency, Millie mistakes it for an impending job offer, and throws herself into revamping her life. In short chapters, readers are treated to insights into the lives of the other women at Lisa Hopper, especially Karen, who has different plans for Millie's future than what Millie is expecting. Though Millie's mundane and self-destructive despondence sometimes feels all too familiar, Butler has nonetheless created an disquieting heroine with an indelible voice. Butler is a sharp and observant writer, who takes to task the tragicomedy of modern capitalism. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME Entertainment. (Mar.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"The New Me." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 2, 14 Jan. 2019, pp. 24+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A571110474/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e8e7ef75. Accessed 27 June 2024.

QUOTED: "bleak and visceral."

Butler, Halle. The New Me. Penguin. Mar. 2019. 208p. ISBN 9780143133605. pap. $16. ebk. ISBN 9780525505402. F

"If I had a better job, I'd have more money. If I were a better person, I'd have more friends. If I took better care of myself, I'd be able to wear better clothes. If I, if I, if I ... (fill in the blank)." How many of us have this sort of loop running through our heads? Most of the time, these ideas at least offer the promise of hope, the notion that one's life really can improve if we do the work and aim for our goals. However, in this latest novel by Butler (Jillian), 31-year-old Millie uses her "what-ifs" self-destructively, almost in an addictive manner. Any whispers that things could be better are loudly drowned out by bitterness and self-loathing. Millie faces the savagery of her high-end workplace, the biting remarks, the challenge to live up to ever-changing fashion expectations of coworkers, all without a safety net, and then returns to an empty house. Will anything come along to end this downward spiral?

VERDICT This cautionary tale, bleak and visceral, looks at the dark underbelly of what it takes to survive when one's worth depends solely on wealth or lack thereof. From a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and Granta Best of Young American Novelists.--Susanne Wells, Indianapolis P.L.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Library Journals, LLC
http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/reviews/xpress/884170-289/xpress_reviews-first_look_at_new.html.csp
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Wells, Susanne. "Butler, Halle. The New Me." Xpress Reviews, 1 Feb. 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A572716059/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a11553de. Accessed 27 June 2024.

Butler, Halle BANAL NIGHTMARE Random House (Fiction None) $28.00 7, 16 ISBN: 9780593730355

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.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Butler, Halle: BANAL NIGHTMARE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A795673898/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cc8a238d. Accessed 27 June 2024.

"'The New Me' Is Meh About Ambition And Adulthood." All Things Considered, 19 Mar. 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A580047932/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=336a9677. Accessed 27 June 2024. "The New Me." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 2, 14 Jan. 2019, pp. 24+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A571110474/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e8e7ef75. Accessed 27 June 2024. Wells, Susanne. "Butler, Halle. The New Me." Xpress Reviews, 1 Feb. 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A572716059/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a11553de. Accessed 27 June 2024. "Butler, Halle: BANAL NIGHTMARE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A795673898/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cc8a238d. Accessed 27 June 2024.

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