This collection of short stories by Steve Wiegenstein describes quirky small town and rural Ozarkers, both realistically and compassionately. If they are all crazily dysfunctional he doesn’t come down too hard on them for their lack of comprehension of the world around them. Chronicles of the clueless make for interesting reading. These are enormously enjoyable tales. Often the marginalized are described with unrealistic, gummy sympathies that are in fact thinly disguised condescension. Slice-of-life literature often has an ideological point—the characters being pawns of a political point of view. His characters may be in difficult circumstances, but they don’t come off as victims. That makes them more alive than much fiction about ordinary folks. These are very real screwballs, wonderfully set in out of the way places—like the scattered lights you see from an airplane traveling between coasts.
Some short “Discussion Questions” are in the back of the book: “Although the stories are set in the Ozarks, do you see them as having wider significance about people and life in general?”
William Faulkner’s Mississippi is also populated by intriguing eccentrics, but Wiegenstein’s style isn’t Faulkner-esque. His sentences are way too short for one thing. That there are some similarities indicates Wiegenstein’s stories have “wider significance.”
Leland thought the tales oddly Fellini-esque—indicating a very much “wider significance”—not like the surrealism of the Italian filmmaker’s wild indifference to chronological time and juxtapositions of supreme strangeness, but rather in his poetic naturalism. Fellini has a similar love of ordinary folk and forgiveness of their profound misconceptions and occasional violence. Scattered Lights stories are quite cinematic as well. Leland said, “As I read on, I began hearing Nina Rota for the score, not fiddles or banjoes. Pulling up some Rota scores on YouTube, I read more of the stories as Rota’s wistful music played and it was indeed a wondrous fit.”