Banal Nightmare - Halle Butler - Random House Trade

''Margaret Anne (''Moddie'') Yance had just returned to her native la nd in 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.'' So begins Banal Nightmare, Halle Butler's tour de force that follows Moddie as she throws herself at the mercy of her old friends who never left their hometown. Friends who all seemingly work at the local liberal arts college, who are all suddenly tipping toward middle age, going to parties, sizing each other up, obsessing over past slights, and dreaming of wild triumphs couched in elaborate revenge fantasies. When her friend Pam invites a mysterious New York artist to take up a winter residency in town, Moddie has no choice but to confront a trauma from her past and grapple with the reality of what her life has become. As the day of reckoning approaches, friends will become enemies, enemies will become mortal enemies, and the bonds forged in childhood will be tested to their extreme''--