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LAST ACTS

Alex Sammartino

Even though his wife left him for his boss and his firearms store is failing and his only child can't hold down a job because of his drug addiction, things are looking up for David Rizzo.

His son Nick has just come back to life after a fatal overdose which means one thing: Rizzo can use Nick's experience to create the most compelling television commercial for a gun emporium that the world has ever seen. The only problem is that Nick wants nothing to do with Rizzo - the failed philosopher who settled for a career in marketing startups can't wrap his mind around the fact that this agitated, opportunistic enemy of introspection is his one and only father. Their tense relationship, mired in mutual disappoint and inarticulate love, becomes more complicated after Rizzo accidentally sells a gun to an underage customer who then commits an atrocious act. Arrests, bankruptcy, and relapses ensue until Nick has a brilliant, insane idea which just might save the day - and pulling it off will be easy: all he has to do is die and resurrect himself, again. It's not every day that you read a novel that moves you as much as it makes you laugh out loud as much as it makes you think - this is that novel. Alexander Sammartino is a graduate of the Syracuse MFA program. This is his debut work.

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Book Published 2024-01-23 by Scribner

Comments

A sad, hilarious father-son redemptions tory that touches every American third rail: guns, drugs, religion... Sammartino is heir to the 20th century American masters: DeLillo, Pynchon, McCarthy, Wallace. He's as smart and as funny and as electric a stylist and as spot-on about the dark societal carnival we're all doing our best to survive.

It's hard to believe Last Acts is a first novel. Sammartino's brilliance and originality shine out from every page of this masterful debut.

Last Acts announces a brilliant new voice. Sammartino is precise, funny and will break your heart all at once. Not to be missed.

Sammartino's promising debut offers keen insights into gun violence, drug addiction, and capitalism along with a skewering satire of social media. His attention to craft is evident on every page (he studied under George Saunders). A sobering tale full of heart.

I'm a bit of a sucker for offbeat father-son stories, so I was piqued by Sammartino's debut. It's about a failing guns and ammo shop in Phoenix, and the schemes whipped up by the proprietor and his son to save the business are mordantly hilarious.

Alexander Sammartino has penned an astonishing baller of a book so pitch perfect in voice (Tony Soprano meets Beckett) I predict it'll be the sleeper hit of the year. A gun-store-owning dad tries to save his unmoored dope fiend son, the latter literally back from the dead. But some canyon-sized gap stretches between the floundering pair. Yes it's a send up of American masculinity circling the drain. Or is it? This funny as hell tale kept me moved to the core. Unputdownable.

Sammartino takes aim at some broad and predictable targets as he traces the Rizzos' downward slide through a collapsing America. Still, his characters' mutual affection feels genuine. This satisfies on multiple levels. Read more...

What a taut, energetic, tender, and wholly original debut novel Alexander Sammartino has written. He knows something deep about the dark heart of America that somehow doesn't stop him from writing about it with genuine, goofy love. Somewhere Denis Johnson and Saul Bellow are smiling because their lineage - that of honest, highwire, virtuosic writing that summons up the world with all its charms and hazards - has found a worthy heir.

John Updike's Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom meets Voltaire's optimistic Candide and Walter White of "Breaking Bad" in the hero of a deliriously dark debut. Read more...

...exceptional, hilarious... 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... Read more...