Book Review: Mill Town (OT)(Reckoning with What Remains)

Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains, by Kerri Arsenault (St. Martin's Press, 2020, 354 pages, $27.99) 

Two stories are intertwined by author Kerri Arsenault - one, of the land and its resources, and the other, of a family, over generations - how the people worked in the paper mills and how the paper mills eventually killed the people, slowly. But they stayed because it was all they knew and they loved the other people there (Mexico, Maine, was a mill town [nearly everyone worked at the mill all their lives]) and because it was easier to stay than to leave. Isn't that true of everyone's hometown?

The history of Acadia* Maine over the centuries entangled with the more recent history of her Acadian family, both tainted by the pollution of the paper mills but also of the monetary enhancements such steady but monotonous (and physical) employment brings.

Can one every really go back home again, excluding visits, weddings, holidays, birthdays, anniversaries and funerals ? 

On the other hand, how long does it take one to become a 'native'? If one's family lives in a small town for generations but one child in a large family leaves, only to return occasionally over the next 20 years and then just happens to try to improve the public health of the townsfolk through education and change and political action, is she an outsider - or to be followed?

LLBean and Bass shoes and Poland Spring bottled water (one of Nestle's 48 brands with 30% market share) and Burt's Bees (including how it got its start) and the vacationland that Maine is, juxtaposed against the working middle class of factory men and their tedious but steady work and adequate pay, albeit also killing pollution. The hard jobs, they pay well. 

Overall Grade: A-

     Writing Style: A

     Organization: B (or A+)

     Research/Content: A+

     Discussability: A

Writing Style: A+

Delightful long sentences. ". . . before the ocean pulls the river away, so many things have gathered in its draft: a tire, a plastic bag, chicken bones, car parts, an old shoe, chromium, rotted wood, arsenic, a disagreeable tangle of wire, a shopping cart from a grocery store that no longer exists, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, mercury, dioxin, even a corpse." (page 155)

Rather than writing something like "the colors were blue, pink and white," Arsenault would write (like in the paragraph above) "the colors were blue, pink, white, green, yellow, red, purple, lime, chartreuse, lavender, and burgundy, not black, brown, orange, cream, turquoise, navy or melon." 

On page 185 for example, "We could hunt, fish, snowmobile, hike, paddle, log, ski, camp, and snowshoe. . . ." Sentences reminiscent of a pre-teen but constructed so adroitly that I had to smile as I enjoyed them. Nearly every paragraph had a gem.

Organization: B (or A+)

Arsenault seamlessly weaves together history, autobiography/memoir, and science/technology and artfully makes it read like a novel. Halfway in, she includes an Interlude and at the end, a Coda. Chapters have titles (thank goodness).

The author gracefully jumps from one aspect to another and back again, from the technology of highly polluting paper mills and their resulting cancers to its chemistry and 'thesis research' including growing up in a small town.

If I had been able to analyze the jumps, I would have given an A+ but perhaps they were meant to be non-apparent and allow the reader to merely slide from one to another.

Research/Content: A+

Arsenault astounds the reader with her technical and chemical vocabulary and explanations including the now well-known chemical dioxin** but the reader is not overwhelmed (nor educated). Nearly 40 pages of notes back up the 10 years of research by Arsenault, whose work began with her own grandfather's obituary. This is a technical book written by a novelist, a text book interspersed with human interest anecdotes. A textbook about one family whose three generations tolerated the carcinogens in order to make a living. After all, ". . . normal is just what you get used to." (p. 31) 'The solution to pollution is dilution' was the thinking of the day even for mill workers.

Discussability: A

I can see Mill Town being the selection of many book clubs, especially those composed of various types of people from fiction readers to chemists and engineers and historians and genealogical-dabblers and  hippies and environmentalists and New Englanders and politicians (or their staff). 

Nothing ever seems to change: we just take from the earth. And take from the earth, and take, and take some more.

I want to meet the author - or at least read another book by her!

Comment: Mill Town would be more striking if it were shorter. Alternatively, it could be rewritten as a strong, memorable article or two (one on each theme of personal story and politics/technology/history/legal issues). In addition, a few photographs are scattered throughout. . . willy nilly, with no explanation but there is a dog pictured on page 190 -  a really cute one at that!

Caveat; This book was sent to me for review. It is also available in the Howard County, MD, public library system.

* Longfellow's 1847 poem Evangeline tells of a couple separated by the pogrom of Acadians from Maine

**Times Beach, MO, 40 years ago, and Julia Roberts' and Albert Finney's Erin Brockovich (2000)(PG&E, Hinckley, California, and hexavalent chromium)