Customer Reviews

About a Mountain

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The critical reviews I have read of D'Agata's About a Mountain have been substantially the same: this is a book that shows incredible breadth of perception and seemingly bottomless insight on human nature, all in a really well-written essay, BUT...where are we going in the end? NYT was also critical of some of the artistic liberties that D'Agata took with the facts. I share the former concerns and was less troubled by the latter.

In fact, for me the biggest criticism is that the book was almost too virtoustic on D'Agata's part. Early on, I felt that I was reading a transformative piece of nonfiction literature. D'Agata sets out on a very promising path, writing a piece of really compelling nature/environmental literature that is only enhanced by his ability to make the point without descending into pedanticism, as so much of today's advocacy lit does.

Unfortunately, the tenuous threads that connect D'Agata's observations and meanderings to the Yucca Mountain story in the beginning only fray as the narrative progresses. He leaves behind the bar room and the environmental advocates that he joins to watch the CSPAN debate over the mountatin's fate, and the tangents and associations that his mind makes are never quite as persuasive. Of course, a piece of literature need not be convincing or argumentative at all to be enjoyable and here is to what Phillip Nobile called "intellectual skywriting." Still, the beauty of a piece achieves full flower when it delivers both on its intended persuasion and artistry.

Without a doubt, there are moments where the reader is awed by D'Agata's skill. For example, describing a rag-tag Potemkin parade commemorating Vegas' founding, D'Agata recounts "An Elvis showed up briefly. Turned out he was lost." That is the kind of simple, declarative sentence that shows both the brilliance and the restraint that is necessary to trust yourself and your reader to understand and appreciate context and subtlety.

Unfortunately, there are fewer of these moments as the book progresses. And, when they come, they are too much like the moments when a basketball player passes up the open man to perform his own high-flying dunk. "He pulled the left sock on his left foot up," D'Agata later recounts, in one of the more heavily constructed retellings of an interview. Is this to imply that he might have had a right sock on his left foot? Or, is it merely redundant and gilded and trite?

In this way, the artist was too often allowed to fully indulge himself, and I wish someone had reined him in. There are other examples and they grated on me more as the book wore on (including D'Agata's tendency to string sentences along by taxing "and" to within an inch of its life, as if to prove that it is possible and acceptable to write scores of words without punctuation as long the sentence can still diagram properly).

Sometimes, an artist's best work is better constrained. Four stars for the author, two stars for the editor, three stars for the book.

It's about a mountain. It's about Las Vegas. It's about language change and nuclear waste and semiotics and traffic patterns and Senator Harry Reid and disaster preparedness. It's about living in a new town and Mayor Oscar Goodman and Edvard Munch's The Scream and building demolition and bringing water to the desert.

It's about a boy. A 17-year-old boy who jumps off the tallest building west of the Mississippi.

It's not easy to pin down what About a Mountain is about, despite the name. It moves quickly and covers a lot of ground. It never drags and I found that I was interested in everything author John D'Agata had to say.

His explanation of the Yucca Mountain controversy was the most enlightening I have read, making a complicated political football perfectly understandable. The proposed nuclear waste site is about 90 miles from Las Vegas. The problem of storing nuclear waste safely is difficult, maybe impossible. In addition, transporting all the country's nuclear waste, a massive amount, probably by truck, would hold its own set of dangers.

But even if your eyes glaze over at the prospect of Yucca mountain, you might be interested to learn about the culture of building demolition as spectator sport in Las Vegas, and the special complications of imploding a tall building like the 1,149 foot high Stratosphere. You might be fascinated to learn about the Boneyard, the dusty lot in Las Vegas where historic and not so historic neon signs are stored. Or about the remnants of the early days of Las Vegas that are being revealed as Lake Mead, the city's major source of water, drops to lower and lower levels.

And then there's the boy (the title evokes that of Nick Hornby's book About a Boy), whose suicide D'Agata can't get out of his mind.

Social commentary, literary nonfiction, or Las Vegas memoir? In addition to not being able to pin down what it's about, I can't pigeonhole it into any one category. I don't even know whether it's a short book or a long essay. Never mind, it's a quick read that's fascinating now matter what you call it.

Las Vegas: The Social Production of an All-American City

Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the Twenty-First Century

Suburban Xanadu: The Casino Resort on the Las Vegas Strip and Beyond

The Yucca Mountain situation is yet another example of the stupidity and shortsightedness of politicians and policy-makers. Thankfully the project was recently cancelled. Although the subject is interesting, I'm annoyed by D'Agata's writing style, which is very mannered and pseudo-poetic in a faux naive way, kind of like Josephine Hart writing investigative journalism.

American culture has rarely emphasized harmony with nature; that's a relatively recent notion, dwarfed by many decades of attempting to form nature to our wills. The habitation of Las Vegas, and subsequent development of every square inch of it, even with its notable lack of water, is just one such example. However, in his most recent book-length essay, John D'Agata enlists it as the perfect backdrop for a skillfully layered story about the cost of American hubris.

One of his primary metaphors is the injection of thousands of tons of nuclear waste into a mountain less than 100 miles from downtown Las Vegas. This rightful property of the Shoshone Tribe was taken by government force, and despite incredible risks to public safety, an ill-considered plan to store highly toxic materials in a leaky vessel in all-too-close proximity to Sin City slid through Congress in 1982.

But D'Agata's lens is far wider-angle than no-nuke polemics. Instead he points us toward greater themes: the casualties of human hubris and how it fares when pitted against the tides of nature. Regardless of the magnitude of will or scope of desire, impermanence continues to hold sway over our existence. Despite the author's biases, often expressed with the deepest of deadpan, he ultimately offers a sense of wonder as to why we create the tableaux we do. D'Agata seems to understand that black and white is hard to come by in the grey shades of human landscape. And that the truth of our existence lies in the tension between rampant self-interest and a quest to understand vaster but ultimately unknowable truths.

The author is at his sharpest when describing the surreality of Las Vegas and its denizens--easy marks, certainly, but executed with a sharp-eyed wryness that relishes quotidian detail.

Stylistically, the novel utilizes a series of jump cuts slammed directly against each other to create a collage of rapid movement--the kind humans full of hubris generally use as they shove Indians off their land and nuclear waste into mountainsides.

One of the book's most fascinating segments describes the dubious attempts of a panel of experts assigned by the US government to create a sign warning generations 10,000 years hence of the dangers tucked inside Yucca Mountain. After realizing that all currently spoken languages will be virtually wiped out, they decide to search for a display of emotion that may be universally understood for millennia to come. One panelist suggests filling Yucca's basin "with a mournful constant cry," via playing music in minor tones. Ultimately, part of the solution consists of "a small engraved image in the apex of each stone that reproduces the anguished face from Edvard Munch's The Scream."

D'Agata deftly juxtaposes this reportage with far more personal stories: that of the family tragedies that inspired Munch's painting, his own stint as a volunteer at a Las Vegas suicide hotline, and a boy who jumps to his death from the Stratosphere Hotel. While he never specifically connects the dots, these stories share an organic bond with the more political material. Not only is it a writerly feat to be able to pull this off and sustain coherence, it's also refreshing to be allowed to draw our own conclusions.

Human actions opposing the natural life of the planet always generate fallout, whether in a literal, nuclear sense or in creating a platform from which humans can tumble--sometimes willingly. And incursion into the natural world creates a tension in even the most well intended of us, as D'Agata illustrates with an interesting tangent about meeting Edward Abbey's son. Apparently Abbey Sr., for all his environmentalism, came with his own set of personally unsustainable practices. D'Agata excels at revealing such inconvenient facets of our rarely cut-and-dried world. And then asking us to make sense of the seas of contradiction.

This is a fantastic book, a wonderful example of how to be innovative with non-fiction. It intertwines histories, sciences, arts, and psyches to mirror and problematize a complicated social and cultural history. Serious readers and writers who are interested in the vast possibilities of the essay style should read this book.

I think there are two types of nonfiction writers in the world, represented by two writers: John McPhee and Dave Eggers. McPhee writes so well, so clearly and tackles such fascinating topics that you forget you're reading; you're actually there in the narrative. Eggers writes with a self-congratulatory, narcissistic style that is meant to draw attention to the writer's gimmicks, not the story the writer is telling.

D'Agata falls somewhere between these two. When I finished the book, I asked, "What was the point?" I can't discern one, and it certainly was disappointing to see this in a Publishers Weekly starred review book, a designation I usually find to be spot on. D'Agata likes to write sentences consisting of only nouns (in list form, but they go on for pages, endlessly); he also has a knack for copying and pasting meaningless segments of text into this book, in an effort to be cute (i.e., the 200 words a linguist decided were most important for determining how languages evolved from a single mother language. You'll be glad to know that "bark" is one of the 200 most important universal words, according to said expert.).

I wanted more from this book. It's simplistic in its description of the political debate about Yucca Mountain, and D'Agata fails to make a coherent connection between Yucca and a boy's suicide. The boy was depressed, he was involved in Tae Kwan Do... and he lived in Las Vegas. That's the only connection D'Agata makes apparent, and it's not enough to make for a truly engaging narrative.

ABOUT A MOUNTAIN began when the author helped his mother move to Las Vegas one summer, and began following a local story of the federal government's plan to store the nation's high-level nuclear waste at nearby Yucca Mountain. His survey of the politics, social issues, health concerns and more surrounding this event creates a hard-hitting series of investigative and philosophical essays probing the heart of nuclear issues and impact.

Other reviewers have more than adequately described what is in this book so I'll just get right to what I think the book is about and that is, America at a certain point in its history, that is to say NOW. A future historian will find this polemic invaluable despite its disguise as fiction. As simply a reader I found it appalling and brilliant. I am used to being pessimistic about where America is going but now I am beginning to think the Empire is teetering on the edge of the abyss.

I just finished "About A Mountain" by John D'Agata, which happens to be one of the most depressing books I've read. What starts out as an investigation about Yucca Mountain, the government's proposed site for longterm storage of nuclear waste, turns into a thorough (and thoroughly depressing) treatise on the futility of knowledge. So complete is D'Agata's conclusion I can't help but wish I never read his book.

Being a native of Southern Nevada, I totally agree with the premise that Yucca Mountain is a REALLY bad idea and a rogue project at best. The author makes a very good case on that front. Unfortunately his thesis should have ended there, eliminating the random walks to his various sets of other knowledge. He is in desperate need of a good strong editor who would have kept focus and who would have encouraged him to stop at the point at which he had made his case.