Book Review: Rebecca Miller's Total parses the lives of women in the worlds of wealthy men
Rebecca Miller, author of short story collection Total
- Total
- Rebecca Miller
- Canongate, €16.99
It is frustrating to feel obliged to mention an author’s father and husband in the first line of a review of her collection of short stories, , but Rebecca Miller is, of course, the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller and wife of actor Daniel Day-Lewis. And then there is Rebecca’s brother, Daniel, a Downs baby who was given away at birth to an institute for the care of such children, by Arthur and his third wife, photographer Inge Morath.
So these males; father, brother, husband: how do they affect the daughter/sister/wife’s work? They suffuse it. There are seven stories, written over some years, set in both the last and this century. Most narrators are women, but men stalk the perimeter. Men are busy earning money and are embarrassed by the ways of women with their tiresome bodies and emotions. Women, driven by menstrual rhythms it seems to men, constantly mutate: innocent child to desirable siren to enormous pregnant belly to asexual stick insect. Men see themselves, in contrast, as stable, responding clumsily and wearily, to the demands of their tempestuous mates and offspring.
Some of the stories examine the creative process: unsurprising considering Miller’s statement that she was raised to be an artist. Set in Dublin, ‘She came to me’, portrays a novelist who has no subject matter. He has used/abused his friends and relations and now must find someone else to suck dry. Randomly meeting a young tourist in his hometown of Dublin he mines her for inspiration even though she has spoken of her vulnerable mental health. Like a vampire he feeds on her, leaving in his rear view mirror an empty husk, as he speeds home to Dalkey, bursting full of her essence, dying to spew it out into new work.
Miller does not stray far from that which she knows and so the prevailing state is wealth. Money flows freely, twisting through the tales like a grand river arriving at its delta. Those characters without money have known it once, or wilfully left it behind, hiding from it, like runaways. The money will catch up, just like a wily detective.
In the title story ‘Total’ Miller addresses the abandonment of her brother and her own need to right her parents’ wrong. The father is reminiscent of Arthur Miller himself, wandering the foreshore, stooped like a heron, his beaked nose and beady eyes probing the foamy wavelets scooting scummily over the sand. Miller has commented on her father’s self-protectionism, seeing his work as separate from, and more important than, family life. He would not involve himself in the mundane dramas of domesticity. Women, she suggests, in these gender-centric tales, have less choice.
The final story ‘The Chekhovians’, would be, were it a play, an update of , set in Martha’s Vineyard. Lara, is a superannuated actress, famed for acting in that great play, and also in . It is fun to spot the reworked characters: Lara is Ranyevskaya, but Anya, Trofimov, Lopakhin and Gayev are all there, stuffing themselves with burgers, at a waterfront barbecue.
The end is foretold, the cherry orchard will be cut down, the ancien regime is over and modernity in the ascendent. But Miller also references Ibsen’s play, and Nora’s final slam of the door: a woman can leave her stultifying home and venture forth, just as a man can, just as Arthur Miller did many times himself. Rebecca Miller’s stories are acutely observed, as her father would have recognised, whether or not he appreciated the shadowy figures reconfiguring himself.
