Halle Butler is one of the funniest and most exacting novelists of millennial precarity. In her first two novels, 2015’s Jillian and 2019’s The New Me, she showed an extraordinarily sensitive eye for emotional and economic vulnerabilities. The protagonists, Megan (24) and Millie (30), feel complex disdain for themselves, their unfulfilling jobs, their irritating older colleagues, as they maintain an anxiously agreeable veneer. Their efforts at work are not rewarded with professional advancement. Their punishing self-awareness does not make them any happier than the people whose lives they scorn – people such as Jillian, a mantra-reciting single parent in her mid-30s.
Other gifted novelists of Butler’s generation, such as Patricia Lockwood, Ben Lerner and Sally Rooney, have leaned away from irony towards sincerity as they have travelled through their 30s and beyond. With her third novel, Butler moves definitively in the other direction. Her central character, Moddie, is Jillian’s age, but begins the novel having thrown off all the obligations she can. She has broken up with her artist boyfriend, Nick, after a brief fling with a colleague who “told her she had movie boobs”. She has left her potentially fulfilling job as a grant writer for a Chicago arts charity, and moved to X, the university town where she grew up.
