Miller is cognizant of the complexity that can still breathe inside familiar stories. She helps us reconsider their elasticity, to see from different angles how they pulse with life ... Miller dips into the otherworldly, though as with most dystopias we’re offered these days, the world feels close enough to ours ... The stories hew closely to the psyches of their characters, a confessional first person or close third that sometimes roves, and it’s in this proximity that Miller lets us see the nuances of these lives ... Miller has an incredible dexterity in the deployment of individual histories: a whole list of love affairs, past losses, leaps in time, delivered efficiently and effectively within the larger narratives ... This, more broadly, is the accomplishment of this collection. You’ve read stories of this ilk before, but Miller knows and is playing with the ways that familiarity is also comfort, also proof of all the ways stories and lives infinitely repeat. You’ve never quite seen them inhabited by these versions of these characters, nor at the tenor of these sentences, with these deftly deployed layers of surprise.
A couple of stories are thinly developed, but the best are stunners ... These stories, at their best, show that no amount of wealth and status makes certain inclines more gradual.
Characters yearning for a better way to live feature in many of the seven stories in Rebecca Miller’s enthralling new collection ... If the themes are similar, the form and tone of the stories are impressively different ... The stories in Total bring to mind contemporaries such as Lorrie Moore and Lily King ... 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.
