For stretches, it is pure memoir—and first-rate memoir at that. Arsenault’s accounts of her life, both in Mexico and in her years away, are mesmerizing. Evoking that particular flavor of small-town Maine life is difficult to do with any sort of verisimilitude; even those who have lived it can’t always manage. Arsenault has no such problem, crafting a portrait that is fiercely proud and beautiful, peeling paint and all. In other places, the book is a compelling and taut work of industrial investigation. Arsenault is meticulous in her research, ultimately building a warts-and-all look at the history of the mill. Good, bad and ugly are presented, all of it with receipts ... Arsenault’s narrative moves with steady relentlessness, pressing ever forward. There’s a sense of constant motion to the prose, even as it relates to the relative stagnation of the place itself ... Mill Town is haunting and heartbreaking, charming and funny … and utterly exceptional.
In lyrical and compelling prose, Arsenault reveals the dependencies that the mill created in bleak blue-collar Mexico and the nearby larger town of Rumford ... her story of a paper mill that sustained and also poisoned its people is one of the most remarkable that I have read ... Mill Town does not deliver a specific indictment. What Arsenault presents, with mesmerizing lyricism and endearing honesty, is the story of a dying town wedded to a paper mill that once anchored the local economy while also bringing pollution and cancer. Mill Town puts forth larger questions of the human relationship to the environment; of the violence done to the land that eventually translates into the devastation of the people that live on it ... Mill Town exposes how the truths of polluting mills, the harm they caused and the harm that they are still causing, are easily discoverable.
As Kerri Arsenault discovered during the making of her trenchant and aching new book, the science and practice of pollution control has been fraught with indecision, ineffectiveness, indifference and often overwhelming corporate influence ... Arsenault’s book shares a spirit with the writings of Terry Tempest Williams.
Arsenault’s narrative follows the path of her research, beginning with her interest in her family’s genealogy and branching out into explorations of the area’s social and environmental plight ... Much of the book’s substance comes from interviews Arsenault conducted with residents ... Mill Town is preoccupied with a poisonous irony: Rumford’s citizens live and work in a place that makes them unwell, yet they cling to their jobs with prideful obstinacy ... By trade neither a scientist nor a science journalist, Arsenault is candid about her difficulties in making sense of her subject ... But while she questions her wisdom in embarking on the project, she seems never to question the shape of the project itself. Casting her handicap as a virtue, she implies that her struggles demonstrate how hard it is for an ordinary citizen to access reliable information about environmental standards or corporate practices ... Arsenault is nothing if not an earnest writer. Yet the stakes are so high that this murkiness about her task — Is she an investigative journalist or a memoirist? And whose story, exactly, is she telling? — is unfortunate. Not treating the book as purely investigatory means she doesn’t have to establish anything definite ... But a story rived by cover-ups and uncertainty is only further muddled by meditations on the uncertain nature of storytelling.
Pensive and heartfelt, the author’s nuanced regional history is enriched by family background ... In analyzing a power structure that binds the region’s economic fate to avaricious outside forces, [Arsenault's] thinking expands and her relationship with the area gains new dimensions.
Mill Town, at times, can appear discordant. There are pages tracing Arsenault’s family history and the migration of French Canadians to Maine for jobs in the paper mills. She writes about the lobstering industry, the food-insecure children of her hometown, and the local ski hill. At first glance, all these added elements can seem confusing. But these are hints that Arsenault is concerned with something else, which reveals itself in Mill Town’s earliest pages ... 'Who are they to decide where I’m from?” That is the book’s big question ... For more than 300 pages, she paints us a detailed picture of her hometown ... When viewed from this angle, Mill Town is less an exploration of the working class, or a cancer coverup, than it is an origin story. The book is Arsenault making a statement: this is where I’m from.
Arsenault’s portrayal of the devastating impact of unregulated capitalism on the lives of poor, mainly dark-skinned people is a serious indictment of the American way ... Anyone who has ever tried to understand their hometown will be drawn to this wrenching debut ... Despite her rambling narrative, the author’s appealing writing—graceful, discerning, and compassionate—will keep many readers turning the pages. A decidedly downbeat story for this difficult moment, then, but undoubtedly a revealing exploration of America’s overlooked and forgotten.
... a riveting account of dreams denied and assumptions betrayed, a timely and timeless portrait of working class life ... With damning clarity, Arsenault uncovers hints of what has actually been dumped in the water, released in the air, packaged in bleached products such as tampons ... Clear-eyed and self-deprecating, Arsenault is a welcome guide through the history of Mexico and Rumford, capturing the voices of their inhabitants, the stories they tell and the confidences they keep. She is tenacious in her search for answers, tender in her interactions with her mother and their neighbors ... Certainty is elusive, but Arsenault’s persistence is steadfast in this tough and intelligent mix of memoir and reportage.
... a rich, rewarding read that defies easy categorization. Arsenault’s writing spans memoir and reference, narrative nonfiction and investigative journalism. Accordingly, her language meanders stylistically, flowing languorously from exposition to personal narrative and back again ... What we, the readers, are left with...is time well spent in a story well told. Despite the gravity of its subject, Mill Town is, at its heart, a love letter to the people and places of Arsenault’s childhood and a plea for a cleaner, brighter future.
The reasons we fall ill, lose work, get left behind as communities and people and families, are so much bigger than we know, so much more complex and entangled. While that’s terrifying, it also means that we’re not completely alone but rather in this together, and in that knowledge lies a huge amount of power. Arsenault asks us to recognize and access this power in the kindest, most forthcoming, self-aware, and subtle call to action I have read in a long time ... Mill Town traces the history of Arsenault’s family legacy in the small Maine town of Mexico, a mill town on the Androscoggin River, up the coast from the tourist meccas of 'America’s Vacationland.' Arsenault does a very complex and nuanced thing for an American writer these days. She braids together stories of class, work, and migration for small town Acadian Catholics into a layered story of place, choice, and capitalist control that spans decades and yet feels as intimate as your own blood, your own DNA ... Arsenault writes about class, work, and what it means to leave, recognizing the stubborn, self-defeating behavior of her people as they reject her perspective because she’s left ... The complexities of who gets to tell these stories, who gets to have a voice, lace through Arsenault’s book, layering the personal alongside the very real political and economic pressures that silence people.
...in an imposing work of narrative nonfiction that blends memoir with ecological exposé and socioeconomic analysis, she painstakingly, and often painfully, lays bare the tragedy that has stalked the town's hardworking and plucky, but ultimately exploited, citizens ... Arsenault's account is enlivened by vivid prose, often coolly analytical and yet deeply lyrical. Mexico's melancholy story—one that's mirrored today in thousands of struggling small towns across the U.S.—comes to life in Arsenault's sympathetic, but unfailingly clear-eyed, telling.
Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains , the debut collection of essays from Maine native Kerri Arsenault, serves as a salutary reminder that there are still places in New England that are organized around churning factories ... Mill Town is a hard book to classify. It’s partly a memoir, in which Arsenault investigates her family history, and partly an exposé, in which Arsenault investigates the horrific pollution generated by the paper mill and the litany of death that led a TV news crew to call the area 'Cancer Valley.' The interweaving of these narratives is an ambitious project, one that Arsenault doesn’t quite pull off. Even so, Mill Town is a valuable addition to the literature of New England’s industrial legacy, something many residents have either forgotten or choose to ignore, to the region’s detriment ... Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains suffers from Kerri Arsenault’s inexperience as a journalist, so her investigations can come off as less than dogged, regardless of how many years she spent on them. And at times, I wished Arsenault had investigated herself a bit more deeply. I wondered how she felt leaving Maine for a college in the Midwest, for example.
Arsenault’s driving curiosity is matched by a stunning vocabulary (catkin and debouche are two such delights). Readers who can appreciate the complexities of loving and hating their birthplace, and who understand that going home is like a “dialogue between two people in a deep and complicated relationship,” will find this memoir well worth the effort.
In this powerful investigative memoir, book critic Arsenault examines her relationship with Mexico, Maine, her now-downtrodden hometown ... Arsenault paints a soul-crushing portrait of a place that’s suffered 'the smell of death and suffering' almost since its creation. This moving and insightful memoir reminds readers that returning home—'the heart of human identity'—is capable of causing great joy and profound disappointment.
She writes poignantly of growing up in a large nuclear family surrounded by the town’s dense forestlands ... In this masterful debut, the author creates a crisp, eloquent hybrid of atmospheric memoir and searing exposé. She writes urgently ... a heartfelt, unflinching, striking narrative combination.
