Halle Butler: ‘I didn’t understand how to be excited about getting a job'

Sometimes, writers chime with the times in ways more serendipitous than they could have imagined, let alone planned; and the results can be a mixture of blessing and curse. When Halle Butler named the woman she describes as “the villain” of her novel The New Me “Karen” and its protagonist “Millie”, she hadn’t any particular connotations in mind. “It’s very strange. Karen, and Millie the millennial, it’s like Caspar Goodwood or something,” she remarks wryly, referring to the wholesome suitor in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. “It’s almost too direct.” She pauses. “I mean, she is a little bit of a Karen.”

She is, in the sense that that frequently contentious shorthand sobriquet – seen by some as a way of simply mocking women, and by others as a way of exploding privilege and the abuse of power – denotes officiousness, self-importance, entitlement. But in The New Me, it also comes with a healthy side order of pathos. Karen is a receptionist at the designer furniture showroom at which Millie finds herself temping, but imagines herself to be on a corporate ladder that will eventually lead to her running the company. For now, she restricts herself to finding fault with the way Millie collates promotional junkmail and requests that she time her bathroom breaks to align with her lunch-hour, unaware that those higher up the food chain find her laughable. Millie, meanwhile, simply tries to get through the days: “I wake up ill. I feel trapped in a loop. I stare at the big pile of clothing on the floor. I eat some dry cereal. I wash my armpits. I go to work. I think things on the train. I ride the elevator. I walk to Karen’s desk. I am either calm or hollow, hard to say.”

This is the world of alienated labour, and it is the world that Butler, who featured on Granta’s best of young American novelists list in 2017, has been drawn to twice; in Jillian, her first novel, which was published in the US in 2015 and is now being released here, and in 2019’s The New Me. It’s also a world she has inhabited. After she graduated from art school in Chicago in 2008, she felt at a loss that was as much existential as material: “When I was in my 20s, I knew that I would have to have a job, and I knew that I would have to have a career, but I didn’t understand how to get excited about that,” she tells me, as we talk over the phone. “I didn’t understand what that would even mean. And I was like: ‘OK, I like to read, I’ll try to be a copy editor.’ I would take copy-editing classes and apply for jobs and I couldn’t get them because I didn’t have the enthusiasm for it. Every time I tried, it felt really forced. And so I found myself in jobs that would be considered menial. And the advice that I kept getting was that I needed to find a career.” But that came with its own question: “Just how do you cure the pain of jobs with more jobs?”

Her central characters, Millie in The New Me and Megan, the pissed-off administrator who sits alongside the hellish Jillian, have the same problem. Every day, they show up for work and go through whatever motions are required of them; every night, they return to their apartments, eat some hastily assembled food, drink beer and watch TV. Millie is especially solitary, her boyfriend having departed and her one friend providing little in the way of support; and Megan appears to be heading in a similar direction, exasperating her boyfriend with her determinedly downbeat attitude and venturing out to parties only to antagonise the acquaintances who seem happier with their lots. Butler is, the novelist Catherine Lacey wrote, “Thomas Bernhard in a bad mood”.

She would probably agree. The New Me, she says, is “a 120-page rant about how much things suck”; it ends – “spoiler for a book with no plot” – with Millie “just in a job, she’s in another fucking job”. There is no resolution for these characters, just more days at a soulless treadmill.

But Butler is also an extremely sharp-eyed satirist, and the books are very funny, especially on the deadening banalities of office life. At the furniture showroom, Millie eavesdrops on the permanent staff discussing a departed colleague: “She used to work here, and they all hate her. Apparently she really likes chrome and has no friends”; one of the business’s top designers has himself photographed in front of a “restaurant-grade Cy Twombly knockoff”. And in Jillian, the observations extend to the eponymous secretary’s life beyond work, including her hapless attempts to adopt a dog for her neglected son and her involvement with a local church group, which culminates in an exquisitely painful 1980s-themed party.

Jillian exists on a diet of aspiration for a better life, fuelled by visualisations and mantras: “When someone opened the door, she thought ‘Action!’ and then her face would become bright and her voice would flow easily out of her mouth and she could say ‘Oh, hi, how are you?’ as if she had no real problems of her own.” Megan, on the other hand, has no issue with telling her life as it is. In response to a friendly inquiry at a party, she replies: “Well, I cut my ass on a knife in the kitchen sink”; at another such gathering, she ends up crawling under the porch to weep. “I was just kind of excited to try to nail a tone where anytime the book started to get too sincere, something weird or something gross would happen, like the dog would eat the crotch of Jillian’s underwear, or Megan would make a joke about some kind of TV paedophile or something, just to balance that feeling,” Butler explains.

“If you can make your friends laugh, you can probably make some strangers laugh,” she says. She envisaged both books quite differently from the way in which they turned out, telling herself: “‘It’s going to be incredibly plotty and something scary is going to happen and people are going to love it, it’ll be a page-turner.’ And then I stressed out; I can’t do that kind of writing. I just did what I was going to do anyway.”

Although she’s careful to point out that her work doesn’t have “an explicitly political agenda”, Butler is preoccupied with the structures that imprison her characters and the falsehoods on which they are built. She herself endured her years of office work by coming home and writing – “I got to be myself and I got to feel a little more human through making art” – but she denies her characters any such outlet. To do that, she says, “would reinforce this idea that, ‘Oh, she should stop being a secretary and she should pursue her passion and become a lithographer or whatever, that’s the answer.’” But Butler is suspicious of such answers, and of appeals to “passion”: “You should have passion, and drive and commitment and a dream and a goal so that people can convince you to work for free or for nothing. That’s fine. I mean, what the fuck?”

Butler grew up in Illinois, and describes a childhood in which she had plenty of access to books, museums and the arts; she has been, she says, fortunate in her life. But at the same time, she wasn’t a good student, no good at “sitting in the classroom for 45 minutes and listening to somebody drone on about calculus without telling you why it’s interesting. You just have to memorise this stuff so that you can take standardised tests that can help the school get funding.” The exception was art classes, and so it was natural to go to art school. But there, literature – and specifically, modernism in the shape of Woolf, Joyce and Faulkner – changed things. “It was just a total hypnosis. A total trance. And so that kind of did it for me. And I switched over to the writing department just so I could take more literature classes, because all I wanted to do was read.”

If a writer bases their work on the concept of failure, what does success look or feel like? For Butler, it’s been tricky. “It’s been a weird experience over the past couple of years,” she replies. “And I would be lying if I said it didn’t make it hard to write.” She is resistant to having “any kind of notion of the market” in mind when she’s writing, finding it stultifying. “Once you start thinking of that, like, ‘Gotta finish my novel so that someone can give me money for it so that I can eat’, or, ‘Do it within the certain timelines so that people keep talking about me so that I can get more money for it’, it just it becomes the thing that you’re trying to escape. That’s really frustrating. And I have no idea how to fix that.”

Related: The New Me by Halle Butler review – deliciously dark satire of office life

It’s a problem that many writers would probably like to have, but for Butler – in common, perhaps, with authors such as Ottessa Moshfegh, Nell Zink and Jenny Offill – the kinds of lives she is trying to describe occupy that hinterland between a painful self-awareness and a combination of resignation and rage at current social and political realities; it would, in other words, be oddly contradictory if she were to be a cheerleader for the idea of unalloyed success. In a world where work is becoming increasingly precarious and workers even more vulnerable to exploitation and insecurity, I think her books are likely to have a long shelf-life, I tell her. She laughs. “I think everybody hopes that their work ages well. But it’s kind of weird to say that I hope that my books age well given everything you’ve just said. I would much rather people feel secure and safe in their lives than that I get a couple more sales.”

She has been writing through the pandemic, although she says she has experienced a sense of grief that has afflicted so many, and that she has felt as though she were slowing down rather than speeding up. Nonetheless, more writing is on the horizon: “I’m working on something. I don’t know what it’s going to be. Over the past few months, I feel like every time I go back to it, it gets different. Sometimes it gets a little weirder and looser. Sometimes it gets sadder, sometimes it gets funnier.” That sounds about right.

• Jillian by Halle Butler is published by Orion. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.