‘Choice turds’ and ‘lonely baby-men’

When Mackenzie Scott got divorced from Jeff Bezos in 2019, she became one of the richest people in the world overnight. Their divorce settlement was among the largest in history, granting her assets that included 4% of Amazon’s stock — roughly $38 billion. She wasted little time before starting to give her fortune away, handing off large sums to organizations ranging from pandemic relief nonprofits to community colleges within a year of their split. Based on the coinciding of her left-leaning philanthropic efforts and her ex-husband’s cozying up to the president, it would make sense if she weren’t wild about what Bezos has been up to. But other than occasional blog posts about her charitable giving, Scott is famously tight-lipped. Mostly, she lets her actions speak for themselves.

So it didn’t escape notice when Scott announced last month that she would be self-publishing a serialized novel, “Last Days in Two Nations (A History in Eighteen Minds)”.

A former protégé of Toni Morrison, Scott previously published two novels under the name Mackenzie Bezos: 2005’s “The Testing of Luther Albright,” a family drama for which she won the American Book Award, and the 2013 thriller “Traps.” “Last Days” is a departure from her earlier work. It’s set in a dystopian near-future where America has been split into two opposing factions, the “Still United” states and an authoritarian regime called the Dakota Membership. Scott’s third-person narration moves between the perspectives of a sprawling cast — 18 different characters, as the subtitle suggests. And while she worked with traditional publishers for her first two novels, Scott released “Last Days” in nine free installments on Substack over the course of August. It was one of the few ways, people online quickly pointed out, that her work would stay off of Amazon.

That doesn’t mean Scott was trying to fly under the radar. Given her evident interest in preserving her privacy and ample experience of having her actions interpreted and misinterpreted by a rapacious public, she had to know that people would read her first published fiction in over a decade with eyes as all-seeing as Ring cameras. If she wanted to stay out of the spotlight, why did she announce the upcoming release on her verified X page, not to mention publish it under her real name? 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.

The bulk of “Last Days” takes place over the course of one week in which various characters collide and conspire to free themselves from the shackles of the Dakota Membership. This fascistic society has been plagued by a slew of pandemics and is now a place where children with quirks and emotional lives, people whose parents had any brushes with free thinking or rebellion, and even those with the occasional seditious thought are liable to be shipped off to so-called self-improvement centers, subjected to gruesome gene therapy treatments, and worse. There’s no internet or non-propaganda news. Even appliances like stoves and refrigerators have been banned, though party officials offer to supply them when they’re looking for favors.

After wading through a morass of unsubtle description, readers are left with more questions than answers about what message Scott stepped up onto her long-empty digital podium to convey.

The man at the helm is President Damian Paxton, an autocrat with a fondness for eugenics, koi fish, lavish residences, and “subtlety in everything but geopolitics and women,” with whom he likes to soak in a giant hexagonal bathtub with fake gold faucets shaped like dolphins, among other salacious activities. In short, he’s a very 2026 cartoon villain. Scott’s touch isn’t exactly light; direct and allusive shout-outs to the Third Reich abound. (“Why can’t anybody in this country hear a Nazi when they hear one?” one character asks early in the story while griping privately about Paxton’s administration.) Reading about the rustic furnishings in one of Paxton’s bunkers or an opulent regime party at Mount Rushmore, it’s all too easy to picture a sovereign who looks something like a cowboy hat-clad Bezos in his infamous 2023 Vogue photo shoot, a newer, younger, filler-filled wife draped across his lap. The comparison isn’t one-to-one, but Scott is clearly trafficking in the visual language of the second Trump administration.

In many ways, though, it is Liv Lockhart, the event planner behind these garish soirées, who is Scott’s central character. On the surface, Lockhart is a true disciple, ready and waiting to do Paxton’s bidding, made up exactly the way he likes (Paxton calls her a “smokeshow,” and one of her female underlings describes her features as being “stuffed into a costume of sexuality like parts in a sausage casing”). Within the relative safety of her secluded home, she is someone else entirely: making fun of her supreme leader to curry favor with her disenchanted young son, Will, whom she keeps locked inside out of concern for his safety while she crafts an escape plan that will get the two of them to freedom. Lockhart harbors few illusions about the rules governing the world they live in; her goals are hardly humanitarian. “There are no good choices,” she opines at one point. “This is not a fantasy buffet. It’s a smorgasbord of shit sandwiches. Just pick one, take bite after big smelly bite, digest, and belly up again. Thought turds, choice turds, every country had its turds, pooped out on a banquet table by lonely baby-men.” She is both complicit and a rebel, an author of Paxton’s propaganda and a shameless non-believer. She justifies all of her misguided and perplexing actions as a manifestation of her unyielding maternal love.

Scott’s descriptions are similarly heavy-handed throughout, especially in the book’s denouement. Many of the characters we’ve come to know — a “therapeutic modification” patient; the party doctor who had been experimenting on him; a cook in one of Paxton’s residences; even Deepak, a character we hear from only once — meet sudden and untimely ends. Finally, after a string of chaotic turns that find Paxton locked away (by choice!) in an underground bunker and starting every day with a cup of coffee brewed with beans from St. Helena, the remote island where Napoleon Bonaparte lived his last days in exile, Scott zooms ahead into the future. There, we learn from an adult Will that the Dakotas were eventually reabsorbed into the Still United states, where he is now working on a dissertation about “the intergenerational impact of narcissistic control on nation states and family systems.” Still, making sense of all that has happened is a tall order. “We are comforted by the idea of the one narrative, fixed, linear, but all of the different versions are happening at once, and they change again when we think of them again at different times, or at different angles. The only common denominator is us,” Will muses. “Maybe all the things we do to each other, and to ourselves, including violence, function to bring us into relationship with each other.”

Thought turds, choice turds, every country had its turds, pooped out on a banquet table by lonely baby-men.A musing from Liv Lockhart, one of Scott’s narrators

It’s a baffling conclusion fit for a baffling project. Is Scott trying to make a point about narcissistic baby-man leaders, the moral compromises we all make, the value of interpersonal relationships in the face of authoritarianism, the fallacy of a fixed and linear narrative, or something else entirely? As Vanity Fair noted, Scott might have considered spreading her wealth a little further by hiring a freelance editor. The New York Post said the quiet part out loud, calling the project “hard-to-untangle.” Whether the story’s convolution was intentional or not, it doesn’t make for very satisfying reading. After wading through a morass of unsubtle description, readers are left with more questions than answers about what message Scott stepped up onto her long-empty digital podium to convey.

Scott’s chosen format doesn’t help her cause. Readers have the option of accessing the text directly on Substack or downloading PDFs fashioned to look like a manuscript in progress, double-spaced and set in Courier. The latter presentation in particular lends the story an unfinished feel. Add to this the meandering plot and smattering of typos, and “Last Days” starts to seem almost dashed-off. It’s so striking that one almost wonders whether this was actually intentional. After all, the choice to publish on Substack has aesthetic effects beyond the implicit anti-Amazon messaging. Perhaps Scott is trying to position her voice as one in a sea of many, not unlike her many characters’ distinct and occasionally incoherent points of view.

The catch, of course, is that Scott isn’t just like the rest of us. She’s a household name, and her net worth is more than the entire US publishing industry’s annual revenue. Unlike so many other self-published writers, her work won’t be consigned to gather dust in the far reaches of Substack. Some 11,000 people subscribed to “Last Days in Two Nations,” no doubt intrigued, as I was, by what Jeff Bezos’ mysterious and brilliant ex-wife, a public figure famously adept at understatement, had to say. But as any disgruntled media worker could tell you, it is one challenge to get readers where you want them and another challenge entirely to keep them there.