Communicating the Nuclear: Narrative Analysis of 'About a Mountain' Eleonor Botoman College

In his 2011 book, About A Mountain, John D’Agata takes on the complex history of Yucca Mountain and the United States’ unresolved solution to permanent nuclear waste storage. Yet, with D’Agata’s fixation on Las Vegas’s dark history of high suicide rates and elaborate ornate construction and his discussion of his mother’s new life in the city interspersed throughout his reporting, the sensation that one is reading a work of ecocriticism is not always present in the back of one’s mind. It is this very issue of communicating potential environmental danger that D’Agata takes up and picks apart against the backdrop of Las Vegas’s desert landscape. How does one talk about nuclear waste today? How does one share the knowledge of this highly dangerous byproduct of human creation with future generations? In his book, D’Agata confronts the issue of communicating the presence of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain across several narrative registers: The United States government’s present work in educating the public about the facility, concerns of Yucca Mountain markers surviving the lifespan of the waste itself, and questions of remembering nuclear waste both in everyday life and in the collective history of future generations.

Over the...