Fire in the mountain

A philosophical and ironic, if meandering, exploration of a disputed plan to store nuclear waste in Nevada

February 07, 2010|Matthew Gilbert, Globe Staff

Reading John D’Agata’s new booklong essay “About a Mountain” is like finding your GPS on the fritz, getting lost, and then, suddenly, realizing you’re on the right road after all, and headed for an epiphany or two.

D’Agata’s style has the off-kilter air of free association about it, as if he’s jumping randomly from first thought to first thought. When you open “About a Mountain,” you know that his subject is Yucca Mountain, outside Las Vegas, and the much-debated plan to turn it into a nuclear waste bin; but D’Agata’s prose skips among descriptions of 1,000 seemingly unrelated objects and observations - of plastic pens, of a highway cloverleaf, of the cost of a towering hotel. You don’t quite follow why he’s devoting page after page to Munch’s “The Scream,” or to a “neon boneyard” where old signs go to die, until you do - and then the book’s connections dawn on you like a reverberating rhyme in a poem.

D’Agata takes such a personalized approach to the essay, it’s hard to deliver a straight-up description of “About a Mountain” without cheating the book. He’s a less self-conscious descendant of David Foster Wallace in the way he transfers his elusive thought processes onto the page. D’Agata, who teaches creative nonfiction at the University of Iowa, spends a period of time living in Las Vegas with his mother and researching the proposed nuclear plan for Yucca. When he learns that Las Vegas, as a county official tells him, “can be wild and it can be fun, but it’s also a place with more suicides than anywhere else in America,” D’Agata’s themes dovetail. The Las Vegas risk-taking temperament serves as a perfect parallel to the mysterious, self-destructive impulse that has led Congress to even consider burying thousands of tons of nuclear waste near a city.

“Yucca Mountain,” D’Agata writes, “would end up holding at capacity, and if approved, the radiological equivalent of 2 million individual nuclear detonations, and 7 trillion doses of lethal radiation, enough to kill every living resident of Las Vegas, Nevada, four and a half million times over.”