Total by Rebecca Miller: An enthralling collection full of surprises

“The idea that technology might alleviate alienation and loneliness, create positive emotion, jiggle the electrons of a person around just so to create a feeling of absolute peace and connection with other human beings, all without using drugs.”

Characters yearning for a better way to live feature in many of the seven stories in Rebecca Miller’s enthralling new collection, Total. Other motifs include the restorative power of motherhood, the loss of a sibling, infidelity as a form of escape, the human need for connection. Thematically, there is a fugue-like feel to the collection, whereby Miller artfully recycles her preoccupations, threading them through the stories like filigrees, subtly linking the individual pieces, which cohere to a powerful whole.

If the themes are similar, the form and tone of the stories are impressively different. The quotation above is taken from the title story, a piece of speculative fiction about an experimental new phone (brand name “Total”) that results in mass deformities in foetuses. The story begins with a general summary of the disastrous invention, before closing in to give a personal account of a teenager who sets out to save her “Total” sibling, E, from life in an institution: “I imagined my sister locked in her white cell on Thanksgiving Day, opening her mouth, her already wide eyes widening high up on that triangular head as she imagined her mother, who was nowhere.”

The narrator of the opening story, Mrs Covet, is also in need of saving. An expectant mother with small children, she struggles with past traumas as she waits for her third. When her husband goes to his mother in search of a solution, the narrator understands: “I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking, if we lose this baby, she won’t survive.” The solution is a nanny, Mrs Covet, whose own history unfolds in surprising style, its sorrow captured by Miller with startling brevity: “Too much love had wrecked her life.”

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Equally chilling is Vapors, a story with a nesting doll structure that recounts narrator Justine’s formidable list of exes. What begins as a gossipy exploration of infidelity and desire moves into more troubled territory of an abusive boyfriend: “One by one, with amazing efficiency, operating entirely by instinct, Joseph was removing the things that had made Justine believe in herself. And she allowed him to do this, allowed it like a person whose home is broken into and watches, silent and afraid, as all their valuables are taken.”

As with Lisa Taddeo’s recent collection, Ghost Lover, the fault lines of relationships are central to the stories in Total, but Miller’s prose is sharper, her plainer sentences have more substance. Her ability to step back from her characters and allow them space to make their mistakes without judgment bears the hallmark of a true writer. Miller’s previous novels include The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, a Sunday Times bestseller, Jacob’s Folly and Personal Velocity. She is also a renowned director whose accolades include the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance for her feature film, Personal Velocity.

The stories in Total bring to mind contemporaries such as Lorrie Moore and Lily King, the latter’s Five Tuesdays in Winter creating the same sense of easy intimacy between character and reader. All three authors favour strong female protagonists who use humour as a weapon to grapple with the everyday realities of marriage and family. They also know how to tell a good story. Miller’s collection recalls EM Forster’s line on storytelling: the only thing a writer needs to do is to make the reader want to know what happens next.

Total is full of surprises, not to mention alarming, disorienting moments. A couple renting a farm in I Want to Know call round for pleasantries at their landlord’s house, only to witness his mother masturbating her dog: “It’s the only thing that calms him down.” After a run of American settings, another surprise, for Irish readers, is to find one based in Dublin (Miller is married to the Irish actor Daniel Day-Lewis). Mentions of Dame Street, Hodges Figgis and the canal bring the city to life in She Came to Me, a discerning account of a middle-aged male writer’s ego and flailing career: “No juice, he had no juice in him anymore.”

The final story, The Chekhovians, is a superb way to end: a layered, perceptive piece that moves gracefully between the perspectives of two neighbouring families in the elite world of Martha’s Vineyard. Blending a coming-of-age tale with a moving meditation on loss, it revels in ambivalence and encapsulates the message at the heart of this very fine collection: “Most people numb themselves from painful things,” he said. “From their own pain, and especially from other people’s pain. If they didn’t, the world would change like that.”