MacKenzie Scott’s Substack Novel Can’t Escape the Amazon Juggernaut
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.
