MacKenzie Scott Can’t Escape the Amazon Juggernaut
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After MacKenzie Scott quietly published her third novel—“Last Days in Two Nations,” a work of dystopian fiction set in a near-future America—in installments on Substack, in August, there was much speculation about her choice of venue. Was Scott, whose first two novels were published by Big Five houses, trying to bypass the juggernaut of Amazon, perhaps as a tacit protest against her ex-husband, Jeff Bezos? One self-published writer remarked to the Wall Street Journal that publishing a serialized work of fiction online “is a risk only a billionaire can feel comfortable making.” Business Insider opined that “the fact that she put out this dispatch from a grim imagined future in such an unvarnished and public way feels like an invitation to speculate about what Scott thinks about her ex-husband, herself, and maybe even the rest of us.”
But Scott’s decision to self-publish could also be seen as a consequence of Amazon’s reshaping of the publishing world. It would surely be going too far to say that the company conjured her novel. Yet there is something uncanny about Scott’s swerve from literary fiction, which she had been writing, into serialized genre fiction, given the history of the “everything store” with which her life and her immense fortune are so intimately bound. The former wife of a man who built a notorious empire by making other people’s books ever easier to buy and, eventually, ever easier to produce has herself produced a novel that seems to have stepped directly into the literary territory that Amazon helped make so fertile.
Scott’s first two works of fiction belong to a very different world. Her début, “The Testing of Luther Albright,” from 2005, is a closely observed novel about a Sacramento engineer whose painstaking efforts to keep his family and his professional life in order begin to expose the strains within both; it won an American Book Award. Toni Morrison, who taught Scott at Princeton, called it “a sophisticated novel that breaks and swells the heart.” “Traps,” published eight years later, tracks the intersecting lives of four women in Southern California and Nevada, borrowing some of the machinery of the thriller while remaining attentive to character, domestic life, and the particulars of the everyday.
By the time Scott published “The Testing of Luther Albright,” Amazon had already become a notable node in the book business, but its most consequential intervention was still to come. As Mark McGurl notes in “Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon,” Kindle Direct Publishing was “the free-to-use platform” through which “untold numbers of aspiring authors” found their way into print. And those self-published writers, McGurl observes, have found their greatest successes largely in the “forthrightly generic varieties of fiction,” rather than the literary fiction of the kind that Scott used to write. Amazon did not invent genre fiction, of course, but it helped create an enormous new infrastructure for its production and circulation. “Last Days” arrives squarely within that altered landscape.
The novel is set in an America partitioned into two factions: the Dakota Membership, presumably made up of North and South Dakota, and Still United, an agglomeration of other states of the former U.S. The Dakota Membership, ruled by President Damian Paxton, has devolved into a tightly controlled society organized around surveillance and an elaborate system of rewards and “self-improvement.” The government’s interest in protecting its citizens has become difficult to distinguish from its interest in regulating them: children and adults can be assessed for traits associated with rebelliousness and other undesirable traits like originality and sent to “self-improvement centers,” in-utero genetic editing is widely available, and a culture of “augmented evolution” is ascendant.
“Last Days” takes place over the course of a week and darts among eighteen different characters, a multiplying of perspectives that occasionally destabilizes the text. There’s a sketchy quality to Scott’s work: commentators have pointed out its various typos, clichés (a car’s back seat is “quiet as a tomb”), and palm-to-the-forehead wordplay (“shitspitality” and “President priss” may be amusing on first encounter; repeated mentions become exhausting). Perhaps, Vanity Fair insinuated, on the basis of the first few chapters, the reason Scott self-published was that the novel had not been properly edited.
But harder to shake than the sense that “Last Days” is a draft rather than a finished product is the suspicion that it is a movie script masquerading as a novel. The quickly paced action sequences and the high dialogue quotient feel optimized for a film or a miniseries. In a scene that has a brisk, almost cinematic efficiency, Liv Lockhart, an event planner working for the Dakota Membership, ferries her son, who seems to apparently have tested positive for rebelliousness, to a snow pit near a safe house. As the plot gathers speed, she works to conceal her son’s movements, even guiding dogs through the snow to obscure his tracks, then drugs a high-ranking official at a party with an Ambien-laced mojito, steals his zip drive, and retreats to a bathroom, where she uses a citrus knife to pierce her chest and remove a tracker that she, like all government employees in the Dakota territories, has had embedded in her body. Elsewhere, a Still United operative named Jonah trains a rat to carry out an explosive mission.
“I have as much disdain as you have for the heavy handed and the excessive,” Morrison once wrote in a letter to Scott, who had been her research assistant and protégée at Princeton. But both heavy-handedness and excess are on display in “Last Days”: its eighteen character arcs are so often convoluted and its political ideas so frequently spelled out that one has the jarring sensation of simultaneously imbibing an overwrought text and its underwhelming summation.
Though the novel lacks a central protagonist, Liv is granted one of the more fully fleshed-out story lines. She is the daughter of a charismatic figure named Magnus Lockhart, the founder of the Church of the Long Tomorrow, a Scientology-like cult whose presence hangs over the book. Liv escaped her father’s underground compound when she was twelve, during a standoff with armed forces, crawling through an air duct as her father intoned, “Look at the lengths they will go to control you. Stay with me; I’ll protect you.” Years later, that history is an eerie prelude to the woman Liv has become: one who has learned to survive by moving through another system of coercion while helping to make its demands appear attractive. As a mother, Liv has made herself indispensable to Paxton’s government in order to protect her son, accepting her event-planning job with the Bureau of Rewards for Courage, a government agency that’s housed for some reason in a haunted hotel, in the hope of guaranteeing his “unmutilated survival.”
Liv’s predicament is shared by other parents in the novel: her colleague Gary Handler, with whom she carries on an affair, has also taken his government position partly to give his wife and daughter a measure of freedom. And Enrique, the President’s cook, loathes the man he serves but accepted the job to secure “better medical care” for his daughter. Yet, as Scott is at pains to show, resistance can become an instrument of the state—even acts of subterfuge undertaken for the love of a child can produce unforeseen consequences. The epilogue makes the point with grim bluntness: the Bureau of Rewards for Courage, which is eventually revealed to be a front for the resistance, enables the “defeat of a dictator” but also “the internment and genetic mutilation of half a million people.” The novel’s moral universe is full of such double exposures.
To the extent that “Last Days” is a satire, its broadest target is the megalomaniacal leader—President Paxton belongs to the familiar species of ruler whose self-regard, paranoia, and appetite for control have blimped out into national policy. As Liv remembers it, he “had sneaked up on them in a moment of weakness with his scaremongering and his promise of a solution.” Paxton, who, we learn, was raised in South Africa, fancies himself one move ahead of everyone else, and is also a clean freak who requires strangers to be scrubbed with a decontaminating solution before meeting him. An erstwhile surgeon, he apparently believes that “eugenics were necessary to eliminate the threat of lone-wolf terrorism in a biotech enabled world.” But his scientific pretensions are continually undercut by vanity (he has added his visage to Mt. Rushmore), an appetite for power, and gauche showmanship (he has a predilection for “tits and Taps, pomp and debauchery”).
Yet Scott’s attempt at satire backfires: she makes Paxton too easy to understand and therefore to dismiss. He is a collection of recognizable tics—germophobia, narcissistic self-regard, sexual appetite, pseudoscientific bumptiousness—that often recall our current bleach-injector-in-chief rather than a psychologically involving fictional figure. Scott, who tends to tell us what a character represents rather than letting readers draw their own conclusions, writes that Paxton shares a first name with the “patron saint of physicians,” who “invented a medieval electuary called opopira, a drug mixed with sugar or honey used to treat paralysis, not unlike the false-promising sweet-talk their doctor president had used to treat the nation’s panic-induced bureaucratic impotence.”
A more consequential problem is structural. Scott tries to make her novel accommodate the tropes of thrillers, political satires, speculative fiction, and psychological portraiture all at once, and the chapters repeatedly dogleg from one mode and story line to another. A dystopian novel need not supply a technical manual for the nightmare it presents, but its details should accumulate into a sufficiently tangible or believable world, and Scott’s never does. The division between the two nations of the novel’s title, for instance, has hardened in the aftermath of an untold number of pandemics that “moved people to acts of great desperation,” but readers never learn what caused the pandemics or how much time has elapsed since the latest one.
Scott also has an unfortunate tendency of dispensing with characters in a matter of pages. We are introduced to one woman, the wife of a high-ranking government official, as she is being held in prison for unknown reasons. She has led a “gentle” life, Scott tells us, but has come to hate her tyrannical and philandering husband. It’s an intriguing setup—but, before we learn anything more about her life in prison, Scott informs us, almost as an afterthought, that she has died after trying to garrote a guard.
One of the novel’s epigraphs, from George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” describes the “stealthy convergence of human lots,” and Scott is plainly interested in the reciprocal enmeshment of lives, the ways that one life gradually produces consequences in another. But the story she weaves is less an intricate web than a set of evidence submitted in support of a thesis that seems dully familiar in Donald Trump’s second term: that people acquiesce to authoritarianism out of cowardice and greed.
What “Last Days” most needs are the things its kakistocracy has tried to snuff out: uncertainty and unpredictability. Yet, in fiction, those qualities paradoxically depend on a formal kind of restriction. A novelist has to impose limits—on information, explanation, and points of view—in order to leave room for a character to surprise us, or even their author. When Eliot wrote, in “Middlemarch,” that, “if we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence,” she was making a point about the limits of empathy. But the passage can also be read as a warning to novelists who strain to capture every dimension of human experience. Scott has a keen feeling for many of her characters, but her vision is undermined by a determination to explain too much, leaving too little room for the unruliness that makes fictional lives feel real. ♦