There are some novels so searingly precise in their ability to capture a certain moment or experience that you have to stop every few pages to send another perfect quote to your group chat. Halle Butler’s latest, “Banal Nightmare,” is one such book, with painfully accurate renderings of subjects from the lackluster dating pool of heterosexual men (“For the love of god, no more losers, no more strivers, no more men with something to prove about themselves”) to the imbalance of domestic duties between the sexes (“She did all of the laundry, cooked all of the meals, took out the trash, cleaned, shopped, paid the bills, all of it, he did none of it, she did all of it, holy god for 10 years all of it”) to the pampering of millennials (“the coddling infantilization of her generation, who, though well into their 30s, seemed to need constant affirmation and authoritative direction to make it through the week”).

The novel follows Margaret Yance, or “Moddie,” a 30-something woman living in Chicago who has broken up with her boyfriend of 10 years. After the split, she flees the city for the summer, returning to her hometown, a place simply referred to as X. Back in this small, do-nothing community, she reconnects with old friends to escape the intrusive thoughts about her ex and about her every fault, desperate to relieve herself of the impending feeling that she has already failed at life. Of course this is all easier said than done, and Moddie starts the book struggling to rid herself of, well, herself.

“The worst parts of Chicago had followed her here,” she thinks, “because the worst parts of Chicago had been inside of her.”

As Moddie begins to clumsily insert herself into her hometown’s social scene, she tries to navigate her friends’ domestic struggles. Because she’s not the only one foundering — everyone around her, it seems, also iscoming to grips with their relationship highs and lows, career realities and visions for the future. Often, this leads her to bleak realizations about “how unessential she was to the rest of the world now that she was childless, unemployed, middle-aged and single.”

While not necessarily the first in the category of the millennial midlife novel, “Banal Nightmare” may be one of the most essential. It does for this generation what movies like “The Big Chill” and “A Woman Under the Influence” did for previous ones.