Halle Butler is the funniest novelist working right now
On resolutions and mental anguish
I love it when I read a funny line, and my mind immediately asks the question, “How does someone even think of something like that?” Halle Butler’s novels are full of these surprises from the comic abyss, but I’ll highlight one of them from Banal Nightmare, her most recent.
In the novel, David, a struggling New York City artist, is spending the year at a public university in the Midwest. He gets out of a class he’s teaching and feels good walking across campus, the sun on his face.
“Part of him felt so gentle and so grateful he almost let out a small gasp. Not everyone spent as much time thinking about the things he spent his time thinking about, and now he was being put to use. At last!”
He feels vindicated and useful as an artist, someone who leads a respectable life. Soon, however, his mood dips as he recalls a student asking him about how the class would help with a career. He feels “bitterness creep into his fleeting optimism,” then considers how his life “would never be satisfying.”
He’s still only walking across campus, all the drama internal, and now that his mood has dipped, we get this passage:
“Approaching him on the path were four young men, slightly chunky but undeniably muscular and healthy, all wearing basketball shorts. He threw the boys a side glance and angrily thought of them as ‘the beef boys.’ He anticipated that one of them might make some passing comment about him or try to shoulder-check him. He started to think about himself as ‘Grampa’ and became overly conscious of his receding hairline and his right kneecap, which would need medical attention if he ever got into a fight.”
So: the beef boys. I don’t know how someone even thinks of this, but it’s hilarious and perfect. Who among us hasn’t become pissed off at random people walking by for something that has nothing to do with them? Who among us can read that line and not imagine forming a yacht rock band called The Beef Boys? Who among us cannot then imagine the cover of their most celebrated album, Live from the Smokehouse?
And yet: I also sort of do know how someone thinks of this. Butler puts her character in a position where he’s experienced a sharp drop in mood because of a memory (the student asking about the financial realities of art-making), and the novel lets David’s low mood play out as he experiences the world. So when a group of bro-y guys walks by, he’s already been overrun by anger and defensiveness, and Butler’s task is to find something specific and memorable to pin to these negative mental states. I think that’s the creative task of writing a lot of the time—not just taking the character through a change, but crafting specific language that exemplifies how the change influences the way they process whatever’s happening around them. Re-reading that last sentence, it seems obvious, yet I think it’s worth repeating. A character’s change is memorable to the extent that their mental state in the drama’s aftermath is made vivid and specific.
It occurs to me that one of Butler’s great subjects is how quickly and randomly our moods can change, how those changes affect our thoughts, and how those thoughts can escalate of their own accord to a place of existential dread or precarity. Her 2019 novel, The New Me, is about a 30-year-old temp named Millie whose goal is to be promoted to a salaried position. In this passage, Millie has asked her friend Sarah to get breakfast in the morning, and Sarah has turned her down, asking Millie instead to come over tonight and drink beer.
“I’m angry for a second, feeling that it must be a deep lack of imagination that holds her back from fully understanding how wonderful my proposition is, and that I, if I am really being honest with myself today and every day moving forward, don’t really need to be around people with that kind of stubborn lack of imagination, that inflexibility and unwillingness to let me take control. No one ever wants to do what I want to do, and I’m so permissive, so ‘Oh, okay!’ all the time, so ‘Tell me about your day’ all the time, that time after time I end up doing things I don’t want to do, acting the therapist, toeing my limit with alcohol even though I’m visualizing tea, pretending to be grateful at my workplace even though it hurts to be there, pushing my limits and biting my tongue until the inevitable happens and I snap and say something mean. But I don’t need to feel this way. I want to be happy, and I want to nurture my friendships, and I want to be happy to see Sarah, so that’s what I’m going to do. I’m happy!”
There’s a lot to discuss in this passage, but what jumps out at me first is that the mental drama escalates through the use of more extreme or categorial language—“no one” and “all the time,” in particular. Once Millie starts saying, “No one ever…”, we are definitely not talking about beer vs. breakfast anymore. What follows is a slew of self-criticism that, around January 1st, we all seem to be taking part in. A new year’s resolution, in the form of “I’d like to” or “I want,” has underneath it the unstated opinion “I lack” or “I’m not good at” or “I don’t do enough of.” And I think I’m curious about that: the overlap and the differences between self-reflection, self-criticism, resolutions, desires, and forced emotions. What does a healthy form of this behavior look like, and what does an unhealthy form of this behavior look like?
Millie’s mental drama takes another turn at the end, when she thinks, “But I don’t need to feel this way.” And I suppose my response is: right, but what makes these thoughts the default in Millie’s interior life? Why does she so instinctually reach for self-criticism? Or, reach for self-criticism that, in its own way, includes a criticism of societal norms (vis-à-vis gender, wellness, niceness, productivity) underneath it? Why is Millie the way she is?
The New Me is the first proper book of our book club, and I’ll start publishing some words about the novel on January 20th. I invite you to join me.
Then, in late February, we’ll dive into Emma by Jane Austen.
Thanks for reading, and I’m looking forward to it!