As a life-long resident of southwest Minnesota, where Yellow Medicine is largely set, the first thing I looked at was the details of the setting. An author gets them wrong, and his credibility suffers. But Smith gets them right, sometimes hauntingly right, not just in the physical feel of the area but in people's attitudes and actions as he lifts the lid off what is, in truth, an often calm rural area to show us another truth: This drug use and a sometimes-nasty underside to people's behavior.
Then, of course, the rest of the novel explodes into well-crafted action and violence that is not gratuitous but is a natural extension of the sort of behavior by the sort of characters that populate the book. The central character is a flawed, relocated detective trying to make sense of his new life, post-Katrina, post-old-mistakes, in the cold and sometimes impersonal plains of southwest Minnesota. The heart of the book comes in Smith's ability to put us inside the mind of his detective so we can see his skills as a cop unfold as he breaks the case, but also be there as failures as a person keep bringing destruction to him and those around him, sometimes with extreme consequences. He's trying to learn, be better, but he sure has a hell of a hard time doing so ... and Smith conveys this so well that, as a reader, you want to take LaFitte for a walk and cuss him out every way you can: Not everyone gets a fresh start, even if they don't exactly want it. But when you get one, make the best of it.
In the end, there is redemption and one of the hallmarks of enduring, powerful literature: Change, growth, self-realization of the main character. The novel has tough language, some hyper-violence and, yes, takes southwest Minnesota's drug sub-culture to an extreme level. But it is still a plausible level. (Trust me on that one. As a longtime daily newspaper editor in the region, I have written and edited several stories about murders of and by drug dealers, including a guy called Mr. Bubbles, shot and stuffed in a trunk of a car and left for a week next to the stockyards in Sioux Falls, S.D. It does happen.) With the current of violence, the rapid pace of the unfolding of the detective work and Smith's own thumping prose, the novel is a fast read. But Yellow Medicine also has some important pauses, moments of introspection where his detective takes a look at what he's done to his life -- and we're almost invited as readers to do the same, ponder LaFitte's life, and maybe our own.
It's a strongly written book, and one of the things I like best is that it is among the first to take its setting, rural southwest Minnesota, and not use it for pastoral writing means. The region has a lot of well-known authors who are fond of the rustic ruralness, and it is, indeed, pretty and comforting. But sometimes writing solely about the area in that way can come off as nostalgic or condescending. It is still an area with people whose hearts beat, and some people who do bad things. Yellow Medicine casts southwest Minnesota in a new way, and does it well enough that this version, too, feels like home. Sure, I'd rather live in a place where redwing blackbirds chirp love songs to one another from within tall grass around a wetland, and that's all there'd be: A pleasant day on the prairie. But I also know that, just a few miles north of one of those wetlands, on a farm site on the banks of the very Yellow Medicine River that gives this novel its name, a man murdered by a bunch of meth users was discovered at the bottom of a water-filled gravel pit, his body tied to an axle from an old car. Our prairie offers more good than it does bad, but there is bad. And Yellow Medicine is a powerful novel that shows us the bad, but still makes us care about the area's good.
