Recently Adam wrote an insightful piece about creative writing workshops, so after reading MacKenzie Scott’s third novel that she published here on Substack, Last Days in Two Nations, I thought I’d turn back the clock two decades (last workshop: Spring Semester 2006 at NYU) and write up a critique.
Not that anyone asked, especially the author, who published this with the intention of it being a completed work! But as a merchant of fiction, I live in the fantasy inside my head, and in my current fantasy, I’m in class, there are twelve students sitting around a round table, and MacKenzie is one of them.
Now in my MFA workshops, we submitted a chapter or two at a time, since we were all in the process of writing the Great American Novel1, so no one submitted (or was allowed to submit) an entire book at once. But like I said, we’re in the land of make believe. So that’s what this is, a real critique of a real book under a fantastic pretense. Why not…
A note about critiques: I had the pleasure of having the same professor for all of my NYU workshops (Chuck Wachtel). Chuck ran his workshops with a couple of rules in mind for the readers (on both the written critiques and in class discussion about a submission).
Begin by accounting what worked.
Then shift to suggesting what can be improved.
While this is going on, the submitter takes notes and says nothing.
When the discussion ends, the submitter has the option to address the class.
I liked this format so much that when I taught my one and only college class (Intermediate Fiction Workshop for NYU’s undergrads), I instituted the same plan. At the end of the semester, I read all the anonymized student comments about the class and I can still remember the one and only piece of criticism: one student was not a fan of this format and said so. She found my adherence to it “annoying.”2 And isn’t it amazing that after all these years, that is the only comment I remember! All the lovely accolades from my other students are long forgotten, which once again demonstrates the unwelcome memorability of negativity.
Anyway, I’ve digressed enough. Critique time…
Dear MacKenzie,
The world you’ve built here is quite alive. This is a difficult trick to pull off, because none of your characters spend much time infodumping — you dole out the information in a very digestible piecemeal fashion. And this dystopia feels so very real, with its own language and vocabulary that reminds me of other dystopian works, like George Orwell’s 1984.
Perhaps even more impressive is the structure of the book itself. I love that you limit yourself to one week, Monday to Sunday; the framework keeps the plot tight and nimble. And to break apart the story with eighteen distinct points of view is one hell of a challenge — you’ve outdone Faulkner in As I Lay Dying, who took on just a puny fifteen! :)
The story is dark, no question, and many of your characters meet gruesome ends, which feels right. After all, the novel is titled Last Days in Two Nations. And the societal aspects that you tackle here are also to be admired. Whenever you bring up the word pandemic, no coincidence that it is always in the plural. Even though Donald Trump is not referred to by name, there’s little question in my mind that the leader of the Dakota Membership, Damian Paxton, reflects similar shades of crudeness and cruelness. Liv Lockhart, your other main character, has a name that’s perfectly loaded (“she lives with a locked heart”).
I’m no expert in dystopian fiction — my credentials are having read 1984 and having seen The Hunger Games films — so please take all of my following comments with a huge grain of salt. But one thing I remember about both works is having somebody to root for. The only people who might fit this bill are Jenny and Deepak, but they are ancillary characters. I don’t need my leads to be fearless heroes or heroines; take Winston Smith, the protagonist of 1984. Even though he is powerless to stop Big Brother and his cohorts and is nothing more than a cog in the massive totalitarian nation, we root for him nonetheless or maybe even because of his weakness (how destroyed are we when he utters those words, “Do it to Julia!”?). I can’t say I feel that way about any of the primaries in your book — Damian, Liv, Jonah, Gary, Gregor, Tracy — I never cared about any of them. Having a character you care about is essential in all fiction, but it’s probably a requirement in dystopia, because the world is already so harsh.
As much as I found the varying POVs intriguing, they also made immersion into the story difficult. Because so much of this world is already unfamiliar, switching POVs adds to the unfamiliarity. More than once I found myself lost, having to backtrack to see where I was in the story. If you had limited the story’s POVs to Damian, Liv, Jonah, and Tracy, I think it would have resulted in a more engaging narrative. The way it stands now, the book feels emotionally scattershot.
On “Thursday,” there is a Damian section that features dialogue between him and Liv that goes on for a very long time. You might want to break that up, because it’s an exhausting read. I know Liv is being interrogated and it is an exhausting situation for her, but there’s no need to exhaust your readers, too, if that makes sense.
The character I seem to know best is Damian, which is sad and awful! I wish this weren’t so, because he’s so horrid. And weirdly, at the same time, I feel like I don’t understand him. At the core of it, what is his motivation? Much of his exteriority is explored, but perhaps not enough of his interiority. Though I should mention, this could just be a personal limitation, that I cannot make sense of the innerworkings of someone like Paxton no matter how much you reveal. I don’t know — I’ll probably need to think on this some more.
Lastly, I want to tell you how arrestingly, hauntingly beautiful your prologue and epilogue are. It’s the finest writing in the book, hands down. The epilogue is a chilling coda; I love how you sneakily link up Churchill’s dentures with Paxton. I got a real sense of timelessness with the ending, that so much of all of the struggles and triumphs and failures of humanity both good and bad will end up as detritus. I was reminded of the Chuck Palahniuk quote in Fight Club: “On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”
That’s it! I respect this book of yours more than I liked it, but maybe that was your intent all along. If you have a question about anything I wrote here, please ask away. Looking forward to chatting with you at Apple after workshop.3
Though, being the uber-preparer that I am, I actually began my MFA journey already having written the first draft of my first novel.
Even though no name was attached to it, I know who you were!
Didn’t realize Apple is no more. 17 Waverly Place, we used to hang out there after class, me and my fellow workshoppers…