Book Review: South Dakota Blues

Title: South Dakota Blues 

Author: Timothy Dorr

Date: 2021

Publisher: Amazon

Length: 264 e-pages

Quote: "Instead of a machine gun, flying hammer or swinging anvil, John hurled snow with a vengeance. Now against a new enemy–the snow."

John plays online games. That's about all. Competent at school, able to earn money teaching computer gaming skills, and considered attractive, John is living with post-traumatic stress so severe he can hardly talk to other males in real life. His parents have torn him away from his first girlfriend, Deidra; though he promptly falls in love with Johanna at his new school, his bigamous tendencies apparently will never be fully resolved. 

Johanna sees John's problems, but she's the kind of girl who takes them as a challenge. As in the Scottish ballad, where someone "forbids" the girls to visit a nearby manor "while young Tam Lin is there," and Janet goes there "as fast as she could hie"...Nobody else has seemed too positive about what's wrong with Tam Lin, who, according to some versions, is an old childhood friend of Janet's, but he tells Janet that he's the protege of some "Faery" people who have allowed him to do whatever he liked while planning to sacrifice him. In order to save him, Janet has to pull him off his horse and hang on to him while he is transformed, by wicked magic, into a series of unappealing forms, ending up as "a naked knight" she must cover with her mantle. Then he will be fully human again. The ballad suggests that just breaking the enchantment makes Tam Lin a good husband and father.

In real life it's not so easy. That's what I like about South Dakota Blues. After a slow start, John and Johanna set off on a road trip where John gradually starts pushing himself to talk to men they meet. His memories soon push up to the surface. He tells Johanna about the incident. But he's not instantly healed; the emotional maelstrom, and the hazards of loving him, seem to be only beginning. He wrecks the motorcycle they're riding and scatters Johanna's clothes and souvenirs on the road. Deidra arranges to run into them on the road, and the novel suggests that she'll continue to bump into them all the rest of their lives.

John dreams of soaring like an eagle, and the novel assures readers that, once he's overcome his PTSD, his career will be able to soar. On his road trip his impressions of the people he and Johanna meet, the stories they tell, suggest something like "past lives therapy." Certainly he learns from empathizing with people in real situations rather than game battles. 

Relatively little of the story takes place in South Dakota. John's home is Florida, he's transplanted to Minnesota (in midwinter), and he and Johanna go to Denver. South Dakota is merely the scene of his biggest emotional breakthroughs. The journey seems to be more about the transformative power of solitude--John is steering his bike, music blasting from a box ahead of him and Johanna clutching him from behind, but that still forces him to face his thoughts and memories--than about South Dakota, as such. 

Music plays a large part in this novel, too. The characters aren't really musical; there's only a passing reference to their taste for 1980s-style pop music as a change from the 1960s and 1970s songs their parents listen to at home. The band and song names mentioned don't come from any list of 1980s pop hits. In the author's mind this book probably has its own sound track of all-new songs with banging beats and synthesizer experiments. It would be interesting if that album were ever released.

Some readers may wish more attention had been paid to the places and people John and Johanna encounter. We spend most of the book inside a young person's narrow, self-obsessed mind. This can be a narrow place. It certainly doesn't make for travelogue-style writing; though John and Johanna are interested in the stories they hear, imagining themselves in the roles of the slaves and Revolutionary War soldiers and country vets and other people they meet, this is not the book for those who want to know all about the attractions of each town along the way. John's focus on music, mileage, and self is believable, though, for his character. He'll be ready to slow down and appreciate places, rather than merely roaring through them, in another twenty or thirty years.