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. Here he describes local reaction after the Nevada Test Site was established:
The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce did its part during this time by distributing free twelve-month color calendars inscribed with the schedule of the site’s atomic tests.
The Atomic View Motel would boast “the best views of the blasts from anywhere in Vegas!”
At the Sands they held an annual “Miss Atomic Bomb” pageant.
And at a women’s hair salon inside the Flamingo, they lifted women’s coifs into a bundled-up creation that they called without irony “the mushroom ’do.”
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.
