About a mountain

John D'Agata, 1974-

Book - 2010

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Subjects
Published
New York, NY : W.W. Norton c2010.
Language
English
Main Author
John D'Agata, 1974- (-)
Physical Description
236 p.
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN
9780393068184
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

THE mountain that John D'Agata is ostensibly concerned with in his slim but powerful new book, "About a Mountain," is Yucca Mountain, located approximately 100 miles north of Las Vegas. And he's not the only one interested in it: since the mid-1980s, the United States government has been doing back flips to bury the country's entire reservoir of spent nuclear waste - some 77,000 tons of apocalyptic yumminess - deep inside Yucca. In the summer of 2002, the summer after D'Agata helped his mother move to a Vegas suburb, Congress was proceeding with plans to make the mountain a nuclear dump. Also that summer, 16-year-old Levi Presley jumped to his death from the observation deck of a third-rate Vegas hotel. These subjects, disparate though they are, animate D'Agata's sprawling narrative. The author of a well-regarded book of essays and the editor of two exceptional essay anthologies, D'Agata has an encyclopedic understanding of the form's intricate artistry. Moreover, he is a serious thinker who regularly lays down stylish, intelligent sentences: "I do not think that Yucca Mountain is a solution or a problem. I think that what I believe is that the mountain is where we are, it's what we now have come to - a place that we have studied more thoroughly at this point than any other parcel of land in the world - and yet still it remains unknown, revealing only the fragility of our capacity to know." Rarely does D'Agata betray his emotions or reactions to an event; rather, he works by establishing a scene, introducing tangentially related elements, building layers of complexity and scope, then jump-cutting or circling back at just the right moment, guiding the reader safely - and unexpectedly - to a destination D'Agata had in sight the whole time. Along the way, he provides media reports, expert opinions and first-person reportage. He gives statistics, calculations and projections; he cites policy papers and delves into scientific and academic studies. Also mixed in are literary references, modernist collages and postmodern composites that should leave any decent factchecker wanting to set himself - or, better, D'Agata - on fire. Highfalutin as it all sounds, the result is an engrossing story and an often impressive piece of reporting. After D'Agata explains the failed experiments and damning evidence that make it impossible to believe Yucca can safely hold nuclear waste for anything close to the 10,000 years Congress is seeking, he spends pages trying to discover who settled on that figure anyway. Eventually he learns that the waste would really need to be stored for a million years or more, but that a panel recommended 10,000 years because it sounded more feasible. "It's theatrical security," he's told. "The preparations that are being made by the Department of Energy have no real chance of succeeding." The plans are merely a symbol of control. But some things are beyond our control. D'Agata presents a plausible, detailed doomsday scenario involving overturned semis, nuclear waste and Las Vegas's elevated highway system, then discusses statistics and the difference between probability and a really bad day (because it would take only one). The government, he tells us, wants to erect a sign warning future generations not to go near Yucca. This leads him to ponder signs and symbols and signifiers, what the world was like 10,000 years ago and what it might be like 10,000 years from now, and whether any current language will even be comprehensible then. A list of historical predictions about the end of the world follows. So does an appearance by Edvard Munch. ("We scream," a psychologist explains, "because we need someone's help.") The north end of the Yucca Mountain crest in Nevada. Chapters in "About a Mountain" are labeled according to journalistic staples: Who, What, How, Where, When. Working a suicide hot line, D'Agata learns that volunteers aren't supposed to ask callers why they want to kill themselves. The book's last three chapter titles ask the question that cannot be answered: Why. Why. Why. D'Agata writes: "I do not know how to fix a problem if that problem is someone's solution. "People would call the hot line and I would start to understand. Instead of saying, 'No,' 'You're overreacting,' 'Everything will be fine,' I would sit sometimes and nod, forgetting that there were answers I was supposed to have to give." Indeed, D'Agata's prime reason for steering us through all the glittery factoids and scholarship is to take us to the ledge of what knowledge can provide, and to document how perilous it can be to stand on that ledge. These 200 pages are nothing less than a chronicle of the compromises and lies, the back-room deals and honest best intentions that have delivered us to this precarious moment in history. The book is a shouted question about who we are and how we move forward. This is how art is made. And the final pages of "About a Mountain," which consist of a single long paragraph leading through the last evening of Levi Presley's life, are unquestionably art, a breathtaking piece of writing. Unfortunately, there's a problem. At the heart of a crucial section, D'Agata writes, "There is no explanation for the confluence that night of the Senate vote on Yucca Mountain and the death of a boy who jumped from the tower of the Stratosphere Hotel and Casino." But the accompanying endnote reads: "I should clarify here that I am conflating the date of the Yucca debate and the suicide that occurred at the Stratosphere Hotel. In reality, these two events were separated by three days." Maybe there's a claim that since the Obama administration is shutting down Yucca anyway, and since D'Agata is sensitive beyond a fault to the Presley family, and since the book is so aesthetically impressive, there's no harm in doctoring the dates - especially since doing so gives the book a better hook, and thereby (perhaps) a better chance at finding readers and keeping Levi's memory alive. And, absolutely, all kinds of licenses are taken in the name of creative nonfiction. As D'Agata himself writes, in his introduction to "The Lost Origins of the Essay": "Do we read nonfiction in order to receive information, or do we read it to experience art? It's not very clear sometimes. So this is a book that will try to offer the reader a clear objective: I am here in search of art." With "About a Mountain," D'Agata goes further, attempting to create art through the exploration of what happens when we "misplace knowledge in pursuit of information." But he shimmies too close to the flame. In pursuing his moral questions, he plays fast and loose with a verifiable historical date, one involving a kid's suicide. He does this just for the sake of a tight narrative hook. To me, the problem isn't solved by a footnote saying, Hey, this part of my gorgeous prose is a lie, but since I admit it, you can still trust me. Rather, it damages the moral authority of D'Agata's voice, which is his narrative's main engine. It causes me to question the particulars of two other important scenes that, according to endnotes, were actually composites - a visit to a mall and a tour of Yucca Mountain. I don't know what to think. What's specific or representative or smudged? Pandora's box is wide open. D'Agata might argue that such questions are just part of the truth-wisdom debate in which his book engages. I certainly would listen to his case, and undoubtedly will read anything he writes. Still, my sense is that this singular author unnecessarily compromised an otherwise excellent book. To me, that's a shame. Nuclear waste needs to be stored for a million years or more, but a panel thought 10,000 years sounded better. Charles Bock is the author of a novel, "Beautiful Children."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 21, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review

An innovative essayist (Halls of Fame, 2001) and dynamic anthologist, (The Lost Origins of the Essay, 2009), D'Agata brings his syncopated, collaged, and devastatingly deadpan style to a finely calibrated and nervy inquiry into civic follies. When his mother moves to Las Vegas, D'Agata becomes curious about the collision of science, politics, and corruption behind the ludicrous federal plan to transport deadly nuclear waste cross-country to unstable, porous Yucca Mountain. While trying to collect the outrageous facts about this doomed project, he also gathers troubling information about Nevada's atomic-bomb test sites and Las Vegas' dwindling water supply and its standing as the nation's suicide capital. Shifting between a young man's leap to his death from the Stratosphere Hotel and the absurd effort to design signage to warn future earthlings away from the proposed radioactive mountain, he sheds light on myriad delusions, scams, and lies. D'Agata's distinctive narrative rhythms, melancholy wit, and keen perception of the social facade and the toxic darkness it conceals make for an acid test, and a ballad about the endless enigmas of humankind.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this circuitous, stylish investigation, D'Agata (Halls of Fame) uses the federal government's highly controversial (and recently rejected) proposal to entomb the U.S.'s nuclear waste located in Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas, as his way into a spiraling and subtle examination of the modern city, suicide, linguistics, Edvard Munch's The Scream, ecological and psychic degradation, and the gulf between information and knowledge. Acting as a counterpoint to Yucca is the story of a teenager named Levi who leapt to his death off Las Vegas' Stratosphere Motel. It is testament to D'Agata skillful organization of the book, broken into "Who," "What," "When," "Where," and "Why," and his use of a rapid sequences of montages-Levi's suicide is spliced with Orwellian Congressional debates on the stability of Yucca Mountain-that readers will be pleasurably (and perhaps necessarily) disoriented but never distracted from the themes knitting together the ostensibly unrelated voices of Native American activists, politicians, geologists, Levi's parents, D'Agata's own mother, and a host of zany Las Vegans. A sublime reading experience, aesthetically rewarding and marked by moral courage and humility. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Middling wanderings along the Las Vegas Strip and the Nevada desert. With a hat tip to Bill Maher, a new rule emerges from these pages: If you're going to write about Las Vegas and enter gonzo territory, you had better write as well as Hunter Thompson. D'Agata (Creative Writing/Univ. of Iowa; Halls of Fame: Essays, 2001, etc.) doesn't approach those grand heights, and the heart sinks a touch at seeing some of the halfhearted flourishes: "What I'd planned to do was help my mother find her new home. Help her move in. Get my mom settled." Such telegraphy seems to serve no purpose, and the narrative, studded with single-sentence paragraphs, is similarly disjointed to no real effect. As his sense of geography indicates, he's a stranger 'round these parts, though he adopts a local cause cl'bre in the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste controversy and makes himself a little more at home exploring it. D'Agata takes a roundabout path getting to some of the finer points of that imbroglio, with textbook-like detours"Cognitive science is the study of how humans know themselves. It explores how we perceive, reason, and interact with the world through the complex negotiation of objects and ideas"gossipy dishing of local eco-hero Edward Abbey and musings on suicide and mutant fish. Ultimately, the piece has an unfinished, workshoppy feel, and it doesn't deliver significant news about either Yucca Mountain or Las Vegasyes, the place is an assault on the senses; yes, it makes people unhappy; yes, it's one of the more bizarre locales on the planet. Well-meaning but off the mark. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.