A review by matthewkeating
Total: Stories by Rebecca Miller

4.0

An engaging and unique collection of short stories. The strongest is the title story, "Total," a story about family ties, and regret tied up in a very well-executed speculative fiction framework. Second to this, my favorites were "The Chekhovians" and "Receipts." The stories center around fraught relationships, in general, some of them romantic, some of them familial (some neither, like the first story, "Mrs. Covet"). There's an atmosphere common to most of the stories here of floating, almost dissociatively, and a recurrent theme of life interrupted. I'd recommend to fans of Mary Gaitskill and Miranda July. Some of these stories have been haunting me for a while after finishing, now, especially "Total" and "The Chekhovians." I plan to re-read sometime in the future because I think there's a lot of food for thought in the way Miller manages information, i.e. what we know about the characters and what we don't, and I have the sense that there's a world teeming with possibility between the lines, ripe for interpretation.