Total: Stories by Rebecca Miller Review

Tws: pretty much everything

Rebecca Miller returns to short fiction for the first time since her prodigious collection of stories, Personal Velocity, with the arresting, darkly prescient Total.

From Dublin to Martha's Vineyard, from the anxious comforts of motherhood to a technologically infected near future that mirrors today with dark prescience, each of the seven stories in Total is a world of its own, painted with vivid strokes, whose people and questions stay with the reader long after the story has ended. Joad, one of the first characters we meet, finds onionskin pages crammed in a locked desk drawer while refurbishing a Hudson Valley farmhouse; the terrifying words on the fragile paper haunt Joad and her husband, the woman who wrote them looming over the couple like a malevolent spirit. Her words embody the power of the act of creation and the insidious, untamable force of language once it has left one's pen.

The author of The Private Lives of Pippa Lee and Jacob's Folly, as well as an award-winning filmmaker, Miller has "the soaring eye of the epicist and the sly instinct of the satirist" (The New Yorker), and her talents are on full display in Total. Each voice and life captured in these haunting stories is unforgettable.

General Impressions

I initially wanted to read Total because of one short story in particular in which a woman encountered every ex-boyfriend she ever had. That concept seemed so zany I immediately wanted to read not only that story but the entire book.

Each short story is completely different from the others: following a diverse cast of characters, part of a multitude of genres and themes, there is something here for everyone and all of them resonated with me.

Although I did love this book and will be thinking about these stories for a very long time, if you feel curious about it and are thinking about reading it, please make sure that you are aware of the trigger warnings since there are a lot of them and although the stories end with the main characters reaching some sort of happiness of their choosing, their journeys are something that becomes part of them and not of their past.

This was one of the best short story collections I have ever read and I'm from now on a huge fan of Rebecca Miller's work.

Thank you to Canongate for this proof.

Rating: 5/5