Since the election in 2016, and only more and more profoundly as the Trump years progressed, I have come to feel alienated from my rural Missouri roots along the rim of the Ozarks. Although I have not visited there during this time (both of my parents are dead, and I have almost no other family still living in the area), and have spoken to no old friends (a few of those remain), I know from the election results (71% Trump) that however influential the behaviors I observed and the conceptions of the world I assimilated in youth must inescapably have been, I am so far removed from them now my younger self is practically unrecognizable to me.
When I read Steve Wiegenstein's Scattered Lights, however, the perspective on the world, as well as the circumstances supporting it, encountered in this region of Missouri--which is, as the book itself shows, partly Midwestern and partly Southern--surely does come back to me, even if I can no longer imagine sharing it. Set mostly in the rocky terrain of southeastern Missouri encompassed by the Mark Twain National Forest (the setting most frequently invoked is the town of Piedmont), the characters in these stories live ordinary lives, but generally move (without knowing it) toward a moment of reckoning or revelation--except that this moment mostly only reinforces their enclosure in the ordinary. Some of the stories clearly enough suggest that the characters' fates partly arise from their own bad decisions, but there is little explicit judgment in the stories, no sense that the author seeks to satirize or reprove his characters.
Even a story such as the lead-off, "The End of the World," which features a protagonist who is, on the face of it, quite absurd, does not really mock the character, Larry, a grocery store clerk who lives in the trailer park and believes fervently that the apocalypse is nigh, but simply allows the man's preoccupation to make itself known in the course of his daily duties at the store. That this preoccupation (and Larry's habit of proselytizing on the job) is portrayed mostly as an obstacle to discharging those duties (Larry is ultimately fired, but he doesn't know it yet) and is not simply an excuse for ridiculing Larry's beliefs only reinforces the impression that the author is more interested in a fidelity to the conduct and habits of thought characteristic of small towns in the Ozarks than in seizing on those habits as instruments of some sort of social commentary. Religious fanaticism is certainly not restricted to rural communities, but there it certainly can seem an all-too familiar outlook on the world, shared by some of one's neighbors.
If the approach taken by these stories cannot appropriately be classified as satire, humor, on the other hand, is in plentiful supply. "Why Miss Elizabeth Never Joined the Shakespeare Club" is a small-town comedy of manners of sorts depicting the social rivalry between two local matrons over membership in the titular club, which "meets in a member's home to scrutinize the host's silver patterns and to decide whom to exclude." Miss Elizabeth silently triumphs over her bitter enemy, Mrs. Dotson, when she becomes the agent of the latter's embarrassment over a not-so-furtive sexual liaison. "Late and Soon" chronicles the fiasco that ensues when its protagonist, a slacker named Chester, takes a job selling real estate along the new golf course in a town selling itself as a retirement center (a job procured by his golf-playing father). As he prepares for the interview, he asks his live-in girlfriend (who apparently supports the two of them) to give him a haircut. Afterwards:
Chester took the mirror from her hand. Before, he had looked like an aging hippie, soft from too much beer, partly bald, strings of gray in his red beard. Now he looked like an aging hippie with a haircut.
Some of the stories are much more sober, even melancholy. "Trio Sonata in C" depicts the gradual cognitive decline of an elderly family member as filtered through the perspective of the man's son-in-law. This more oblique viewpoint--as well as the behavior of the man himself, who is not altogether benign--provides the narrative with sufficient distance that, although it is an inescapably sorrowful story, elicits sympathy but cheap emotion. "From Thee to My Sole Self" is a reflective monologue by an older woman looking back at the path her life has taken. Of her now-dead husband she tells us, "My husband loved me, but after the first few years he didn't love me very much. That was the way we were then; the husband went about his business, the wife went about hers, and you didn't talk of love." Thus the woman had a brief but intense affair with a man named Marshall, but he, too, is dead, and now she confesses to living in the past:
Why shouldn't I live in the past? There have been two men that I have loved and hated and come to forgive, but they're dead now, in the past. My hands tremble. My sleep is fitful and light. I wake in the night and listen. My bushes brush against my bedroom window. I live in an empty house.
In both of these stories, the same nonjudgmental bearing manifested toward the extreme characters such as Larry makes the portrayal of these more afflicted characters seem simply truthful, not a bid for pity.
The book's title comes from the story called "Weeds and Wildness," a coming of age story of sorts in which a recent high school graduate, Mark, uncertain about where his future really lies, delays a decision to go to college and takes a temporary job at The Farm and Home Supply store. A subplot involves Charley Blankenship, a local ne'er do well whose son had been Mark's high school classmate and who has himself joined the military. Charley, an ex-con, has apparently turned informant in a drug investigation and is about to flee the area, but before he does entrusts Mark with a secret to pass on to Charley's son. It is in considering this responsibility that Mark looks down from a ridge onto his hometown, with "its scattered lights. . .like someone's Christmas decorations tossed in the yard, still lit."
If Mark is a hometown boy who seems to be considering whether that town will remain his permanent home, two of the stories, "Bill Burkens and Peter Krull" and "Unexplained Aerial Phenomena," feature protagonists who find themselves residing in small southern Missouri towns for professional reasons, but otherwise feel themselves to be apart from the company they are hesitantly keeping. Peter Krull is the reporter for a small-time newspaper who is acutely conscious of the inconsequential "news" he covers (the usual small-town minutiae) but can't quite satisfy his curiosity about a local hermit found dead in a lake. Likely a suicide, the sheriff has it declared an accidental drowning, and Peter attempts to uncover more information about the man, Bill Burkens, a Vietnam vet who apparently simply withdrew from the world to live a subsistence-level life in his trailer in the woods. Yet Peter comes to admire Bill Burkens as "the only truly harmless man he ever knew, the only truly secure, truly free man."
In "Unexplained Aerial Phenomena" the protagonist, Janine, is a sociology professor at a small college in Springfield. As a research project she decides to "study" a series of UFO sightings in a small town in the area, where she goes to interview a man named Woodrow Bird, the first person to report the UFOs. Although she is clearly prepared to condescend to Woodrow (while assuring him and others she has a merely scholarly interest in the phenomenon), she finds herself won over by his sincerity and at the story's conclusion joins him and some of his friends in an attempted sighting, where she might or might not witness extraterrestrial event (or an "Aquatic Phenomenon," since it takes the form of a mysterious green light moving through the waters of a lake). Janine seems shaken by the experience, but more importantly gives up her patronizing attitude toward the locals.
It is with these two stories in particular that I myself find it most difficult to overcome my own acquired condescension toward the locals among whom I was raised--who are certainly reflected clearly enough in the characters of Scattered Lights--and to fully appreciate Janine's or Peter Krull's at least momentary solidarity with those people they have otherwise largely failed even to notice. If I find these moments of recognition somehow falling flat, I must conclude that, since, within the dramatic development of the stories themselves, they are perfectly well-justified, the problem no doubt lies in my own churlish disaffection, not in the execution of the narratives, which is skillfully done.
With "Signs and Wonders," Scattered Lights begins where it started, with another story about Larry the religious fanatic, who is now in an evangelical encampment awaiting The Rapture, foretold by Brother Moore, the encampment's leader. If anything, Larry is portrayed even more sympathetically in this story, as his commitment to Brother Moore's ministry is clearly wavering (The Rapture doesn't come). By the story's end, after Brother Moore tries and fails to rally the congregation through some snake-handling, Larry is left to contemplate his discontent with the world as it is, a sentiment we indeed might all acknowledge, even if we can't finally comprehend the choices Larry himself has made.
