Mid-20s cynical semi-drunk Megan is obsessed with her co-worker, Jillian, a single mom in her mid-30s, relentlessly upbeat and full of love for the Lord. Obsessed in a negative way because Megan hates Jillian. Megan hates full stop. Except when Jillian’s life starts to go tits up and then Megan l-u-v-s the fallout. But how will Jillian react to unending Ls?
I read Halle Butler’s second novel, The New Me, five years ago and thought it was utter pants. But then I saw the title of her latest book - Banal Nightmare - which stood out to me. Hmm, I bethought, that sounds like someone with my kind of personality. The library didn’t have that but they had this: her debut novel, Jillian. And the premise intrigued me. All this to explain why I revisited an author I one-starred the first time around and gave her a totally opposite rating the second time. And it’s fun to know how people find books, I bethink.
Yeah, Jillian is cracking stuff - really enjoyed it. It’s shocking that Halle Butler started this well and then immediately hit the skids with her follow-up novel but I’m glad I gave her another shot because she’s a helluva writer.
Jillian is a character-driven novel, rather than plot-oriented, but reads very quickly because the two main characters are so engaging. Perhaps it’s because I’m a huge fan of Simon Hanselmann’s Megg and Mogg comics but Megan is, coincidentally, almost exactly like Megg. She’s depressed, in a bad relationship, constantly abusing substances, wishing for direction and purpose in her life while doing nothing to change things, and generally hating herself and everyone around her.
Jillian on the other hand is absurdly upbeat, to the point where she’s almost delusional. But it’s entertaining to take someone like that and then pelt them with shit and see how they react. She fixates on getting on a dog for bizarre reasons, which is the unexpected beginning of her bad times - from that point on, things go very downhill for poor Jill.
The novel becomes more compelling to see how she’ll react to circumstances because she’s unpredictable and already kinda unhinged, and only becomes more so as things become more desperate for her. Not that Megan’s life gets any better - she quietly glees in Jillian’s miseries but her life chugs along in a consistently abysmal straight line; what will happen to her? And I was on board for all of it!
The novel is well-written and the characters are enthralling, even supporting characters like snooty bitch Elena and crap friend Amanda, who wonderfully rips Megan a new one during a party. All the main characters are female and nearly all of them are obsessed with one another in a bad sense - except for Jillian, who’s too self-absorbed to really think too much about anyone else. And I think having that enmity makes characters that much more exciting - there’s immediate tension in a scene if you know one character despises another, because you’re wondering what’s about to happen between them.
The only minor criticisms I would level at the novel is that Megan remains one-note throughout: she ends the book pretty much the same person as she was when she started it, and, while Jillian has this descent over the course of the story, Megan doesn’t, which made her scenes less interesting to read. That’s probably the point - true to her character, Megan stubbornly resists doing the cliched literary trope of having an arc - but it still feels repetitive and stale after a spell.
This isn’t the kind of story that builds to a big climax - it just ends - but I still felt it wanting. I suppose that’s the mark of a good story - to leave you wanting more - but just a little bit more on Jillian’s fate would’ve made it more satisfying. The symbolic conversation we get between two male strangers instead is still funny though - this is a whole novel about shitty people doing shitty things to one another and that last chapter is Butler underlining the whole “fuck you” mentality one last time. (The two guys basically say to one another “Hey, we should be nicer to each other and life will be better” and Megan just turns away, disinterested.)
Jillian is a really fun personality-driven drama between two nutjobs - very entertaining, definitely recommended, and I’m looking forward to checking out Banal Nightmare soon.
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