11/8/2020

A River Runs Through It and Other Stories by Norman Maclean

I read a review of this somewhere, and the review said that each sentence builds off one the previous one; nothing is repeated. That was an intriguing comment and it’s been on my TBR list for over a year. It’s a short book, but one to be savored. The moments are long and poetic, yet movement happens quickly. It’s tagged as fiction, but it seems most of this story is true. America’s Pushkin?

Mill Town: Reckoning With What Remains by Kerri Arsenault

This was a gift from a friend who grew up in Rumford, Maine, during the 1940s.

I read this in a day. Most of my personal “baggage” comes from being from rural Maine. The immense culture shock I experienced going to a high school outside of my hometown is now easily identifiable but was impossible for me to objectively understand at the time. I appreciate authors’ attempts to fill in the detail for these rural areas because it helps me process. I expected this book to be similar - like Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland or J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. It’s not.

Mill Town has many (sometimes too many) layers: the environmental focus on the mill & the water table, the evolution of paternalism & strikes, and the cultural portrayal of rural Maine.

Arsenault frequently writes about her life in other places - always as an aside, with Maine being the focus. I think her writing about being elsewhere is crucial to the perceptive of having left and then not being accepted as a Mainer on her return. She has a house in Connecticut - she has enough money to have a house in Connecticut. It no longer matters that she grew up in Rumford and has multiple generations of familial sweat in the mill —> she’s no longer there, no longer one of them.

The very serious third-generation rule in Maine often feels like a race to the bottom —> yes, my family has been in Maine for at least three generations, which is often misunderstood as boasting when in reality it’s qualifying experience. If your family has been in Maine for that long (and not in Southern Maine) then we probably have had some common experiences. The memories or stories I’ve been told might hold true for you as well. Common ground.

I appreciated the information about the Acadian culture - I grew up in a very different part of Maine where Acadians are less concentrated and where the rural poor certainly do not ski.

I can’t stop thinking about the image of Kerri Arsenault’s mom keeping a copy of her high school yearbook next to the couch.

It also prompted me to go find The Betrayal of Local 14 on my shelf for a perusal.