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"About
a Mountain" by John D'Agata;
W.W. Norton
(236 pages,
$23.95
)
———
At the
end of his exquisite new book, "About a
Mountain," John D'Agata acknowledges that things
are not exactly as they seem. "Although the
narrative of this essay," he writes, "suggests
that it takes place over a single summer, the span
between my arrival in
Las Vegas
and my final departure was, in fact, much longer. I have
conflated time in this way for dramatic effect only, but
I have tried to indicate each instance of this below. At
times, I have also changed subjects' names or combined a
number of subjects into a single composite 'character.'
"
Them's
fighting words for those who take a hard line on
invention in nonfiction, but the offhand genius of
"About a Mountain" is that it renders the
whole issue moot. By the time we get to D'Agata's
admission, we've already given ourselves over to his
subtle brand of experimentalism — a fluid mix of
reportage and conjecture — with the personal,
political and philosophical interwoven like overlapping
roller coaster tracks.
Ostensibly
a story about
Yucca Mountain
, "About a Mountain" is really a meditation on
the nature of fact and fantasy, a riff on
Las Vegas
that gets beneath the city's layers of cliche. It is
also a book that seeks to tell us a little something
about time and understanding, even as it admits that
these concepts are too big, too amorphous, for us to
wrap our minds around.
This is
what, at its best, contemporary narrative nonfiction
aspires to, a story that, like the novel, operates on
many levels at once. And in "About a
Mountain," D'Agata has found a nearly perfect nexus
to investigate our post-millennial concerns. Beginning
with a bit of personal history — he came to
Las Vegas
to help his mother move there — the book quickly
shifts focus, detailing the battle over nuclear waste
disposal at
Yucca Mountain
while questioning whether such containment even can be
safely accomplished.
The
concept behind Yucca, 90 miles northwest of
Las Vegas
, is to create a secure repository where waste will be
stored for 10,000 years. The problem, however, is that
10,000 years is a number more arbitrary than not.
"Taking into consideration that some potentially
harmful exposures may still be possible several hundred
thousand years following the mountain's closure, we
therefore recommend that a time frame be established ...
which could be on the order of a million years or
more," D'Agata notes, quoting a report from the
Committee on the Technical Bases for Yucca Mountain
Standards, part of the
National Research Council
. The very notion of 10,000 years, then, is a leap of
faith, a kind of temporal metaphor.
Metaphor,
as it turns out, is what D'Agata is after, and after he
gets going he finds it everywhere. It emerges in the
fact that
Las Vegas
, which is supposedly all about illusion, has the
highest suicide rate in
the United States
, a statistic almost no official will discuss because of
the negative image it portrays. It emerges in the atomic
history of the region, where nuclear tests were once
viewed from resort hotels. Even the harshest realities
have a metaphorical component, if only for what they say
about the things we take for granted — about, again,
our faith.
Early in
the book, D'Agata posits the effect of a nuclear
accident. "We'd forfeit
Las Vegas
to the desert," says
Bob Halstead
, a nuclear waste consultant. "The city would no
longer exist." To get at what this means, D'Agata
cycles through a series of increasingly narrow
specifics: "(e)very traffic lamp and bulb and post
... (e)very sidewalk square and concrete curb ... (e)very
newspaper stand ... (e)very call girl ad." Implicit
in his account is the idea that nuclear accident or no
nuclear accident, we will eventually lose all this
anyway, to the inexorable flow of time. And yet, even as
D'Agata gives voice to his bleakest fantasies, the city
continues to exist, a symbol for the odd dance of denial
in which we all participate every day.
Of the
metaphors in the book, perhaps none is as compelling as
that of the warning system that needs to be developed at
Yucca Mountain
, a system that must last 10,000 years. This is harder
than it seems because language degrades, and even the
commonality of certain images cannot be assumed over
such a period of time. Ten thousand years ago, D'Agata
notes, there was no written language; the basic
infrastructure of civilization — laws, irrigation,
accounting — did not yet exist. Who knows what people
will be like 10,000 years from the present or even
whether humanity will still exist?
It's a
complex problem, and D'Agata traces the efforts of an
expert panel to create a warning that is itself more
than a warning, that will not so much tell our
descendants about the dangers of the waste at
Yucca Mountain
as it will give them a puzzle to solve. Maybe the
solution is a wasteland of black basalt,
"unwelcoming and uninhabitable," or perhaps
"an echoing aural effect from a series of stone
sculptures that would be carved to emit a single pitch
in the wind." Either way, D'Agata never forgets
what we don't know, what we can't know, which reduces
the idea of meaning to something conditional and
abstract. As he writes, "We must find ourselves,
the panel says, having an experience: an essaying into
the purpose of what's apparently purposeless, an
essaying that tries desperately to cull significance
from the place, but an essaying, says the panel, that
must ultimately fail."
This, of
course, is a perfect metaphor for "About a
Mountain," or more accurately, for any endeavor
that tries to make sense of the world. It's all about
interpretation, which is why it makes sense for D'Agata
to conflate certain details in the service of a larger
point of view. We are here and do not know why, nor do
we know what the future holds. "I do not
think," D'Agata writes, "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 still it remains unknown, revealing
only the fragility of our capacity to know."
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