“Last Acts” takes on guns, drugs with humor LAST ACTS
Alexander Sammartino’s exceptional, hilarious debut novel, “Last Acts,” is the tale of two salesmen in Phoenix: David Rizzo and his estranged son, Nick. Both men’s lives are floundering. Rizzo Sr. is drowning in debt and about to lose his firearms store because of several failed moneymaking and promotional schemes; his son has drifted from a gig-economy career as a digital marketer to become a full-time heroin addict.
As the book opens, David is on his way to a meeting with a real estate tycoon, who might be willing to purchase his store before it’s foreclosed on, when he gets a call from his son. Nick is in the hospital, recovering after a brush with death from an overdose. More than a year has passed since they last saw each other, but Nick has nowhere else to turn.
Thrown unwillingly together, the pair embark on a plan to save the father’s business, which will take them on a merry-goround of success and disaster. Sammartino switches perspectives between this odd couple: The father, a lifelong wheelerdealer who has sold cars, “never-dulling knives” door to door, recyclable IV bags to hospitals and Shasta Jacuzzis to hotels, is an eagerly self-deluding, Willy Loman-esque optimist soaked in flop sweat, whose fondest hope is to be “more than another guy whose life came up soul-crushingly short.” The son, meanwhile, is possessed by an ineffable, listless sadness, “staring at a search bar without knowing what to type,” and churning out internet promotional copy for small businesses like Pretty Paws Doggy Treats and PHX Home Hospice (“Dying is hard. We make it easy”).
But like his father, he too has a dreamer’s spirit, and he comes up with an idea for an inspirational, confessional infomercial that features his own overdose as its selling point and promises a cut of every sale to rehab centers and halfway houses:
“What separates us from all the other gun dealers in the desert, though, is our commitment to combating opioid addiction. … I’m a recovering addict. … My
Author: Alexander Sammartino Pages: 213
Publiher: Scribner
father, David Rizzo, has made it his mission to be the first gun shop in America that aims for a social good. So come on in and tell us your story. At Rizzo’s Firearms, we’re shooting addiction dead.”
When this unlikely advertisement strikes a chord with the gun-buying public, Nick and his father become local business celebrities — though soon enough, Rizzo’s Firearms finds itself at the center of a circus of controversy.
Given the stew of hot-button subjects “Last Acts” takes on — gun culture, mass shootings, the frenzied throes of late capitalism, the opioid crisis — it would be easy for the satire to become heavy-handed. But Sammartino is extraordinarily good at balancing the farcical nature of contemporary America with the complex humanity of his characters. He’s also a magnificent sentence writer, with a gift for pulling poetry out of an American vernacular that recalls the early work of George Saunders, and a sense of the beauty in shoddy landscapes:
“He passed an unpaved neighborhood that, replete with scaffolding for future homes, resembled dazzling ruins; a grimacing man stood on a median, raising water bottles at the traffic; a woman in a sweatshirt pushed a shopping cart toward tents made out of blankets and patched tarps. … It was the time of year when many of the succulents had pink-petaled flowers pinched between their glochids.”
While many novelists are struggling to figure out how best to address the state of the nation — centerless, ridiculous and terrifying, doomed yet trivial, dire yet unheroic — Sammartino seems to have cracked the code. What he gets exactly right is the way we all keep toddling along, heads down, going to work and paying the bills, checking our phones and streaming videos to keep ourselves distracted, ever hopefully, haplessly dog-paddling against the current, even as we’re borne away by the messes we’ve made.