Alexander Sammartino’s debut novel Last Acts opens on David Rizzo, owner of a failing firearms store located in an Arizona strip mall, en route to the hospital to retrieve his estranged son Nick, an addict who has just briefly experienced death in the form of a drug overdose. Grappling with what to do with his life in the wake of this trauma, Nick vows to help his father save his dying business.
The two get to work on a television commercial in which Nick discloses his struggle with addiction to the camera and promises that Rizzo’s is the only firearms store in the country committed to combating opioid addiction. The ad is an astounding success, but the store’s sudden popularity only leads to controversies and complications.
I met Sammartino in 2015 while we were both completing MFAs in creative writing at Syracuse University. We met up in Prospect Park to talk about a few different elements of his novel, including family dynamics, masculinity, guns and opioids.
Jonathan Aprea: I’m always interested in where novels come from, where they’re started, whether they come out of an image or an idea or a plot point or a character or a phrase. How did you begin to think about Last Acts?
Alexander Sammartino: I knew I wanted to write a father-son story, and I kept drifting in writing about these heroin addicts who are trying to make their own version of the TV show Intervention. I just kept returning to that, and I didn’t really see the connection. There was this one sentence that was like, “they will pay for your reality,” which I ultimately didn’t keep in the book because I felt like it was underneath so many things. Once I had that idea, I started from square one again. And then the beginning that I wrote from there is the beginning of Last Acts. That was it. I had it from there. Everything just started to come together, but it took a lot of fumbling around to get there.
JA: Central to the novel is this relationship between Rizzo and his son Nick. It’s a really interesting and funny and emotional relationship for a lot of different reasons. What made you want to have a father-son relationship as the central thing that holds this book together?
There is a huge wedge between how they see the world and how they’re able to communicate.
AS: I love books that focus on the parent-child relationship. Florida by Christine Schutt is a great example, and Eat the Document by Dana Spiotta. In a way I was kind of like, well, what’s my version? And I was interested in the idea of these men who couldn’t communicate, who were trying to communicate but couldn’t. It wasn’t just straightforward silence. It was misdirection, misunderstanding, silence as misunderstood, and that seemed really rich to me. I think the question that really fascinates me, always, and it has for a long time in my work, is what does it mean to be a family? What does it mean, besides biologically, especially now when you talk about generations who have such different histories and such different experiences with the technology in their lives? Rizzo’s reality is really defined by television. For Nick, it’s obviously defined by digital culture. This is a huge wedge between how they see the world and how they’re able to communicate, and I think people can relate to being in a family and having that gap between people they love. To me, that’s where the emotional stakes come from, and that’s where they have to be.
JA: They’re stilted in communicating their love to one another. It’s like they don’t have the faculties to communicate it.
AS: I think everybody has that experience of not being able to express something really important to them. That’s tragic, and it’s also something that dominates your life, trying to overcome that, to find ways to live with what you can’t say. When people ask me what the book is about, I say it’s about a father and son who love each other. I think I’m really hard on my characters, but it’s from a place of love. To me, that’s what you can do in fiction that you can’t do in nonfiction. Because it’s fiction, I can consider things that I can’t consider in real life just in the same way that you’re able to consider the perspective of a murderer in Child of God. You can consider this kind of emotional honesty that you maybe can’t in another form.
JA: There’s something very lonely about living with what you can’t say. That loneliness reminds me of the description in your novel of Rizzo’s habits of watching television, and the different postures he takes on his couch, and his level of immersion and isolation in that experience.
AS: It’s defining for my life. People have written a lot about watching television, like obviously DeLillo, and I was interested in the physicality, that’s the hardest part about representing this technology. How does it affect our bodies? How do we position ourselves? That’s one of the strangest things about it. When else in your life do you just sit still and stare in one direction at an inanimate object? I wanted to capture how physically strange that experience is, and how lonely it is.
JA: There’s a lot about masculinity in this book, especially about the fears and experience of being emasculated. There’s sexual failures, romantic failures, fears of coming up short, there’s guns, there’s pride, there’s comparing dick sizes.
AS: Yeah, it’s so central. I’m self aware of not wanting to do this thing where the emotional experience only matters because it’s being written about from a male’s perspective, that’s not interesting to me. But the way that men express emotions to me, that’s my world, that’s what I’m interested in. And I think all good fiction, regardless of gender, class, or race, is considering that. How do you express your emotional reality as an individual? How do you negotiate that with other people? I come from a hyper, hyper masculine background. When you start to see that stuff as a performance, it comes from such a place of loneliness. You have the irony of someone presenting a certain way and feeling a completely different way. And getting to explore that is so special and rich. I think maybe everybody can’t identify with that, but I think many people can and I think it’s odd to be able to identify with someone who you don’t expect to have that kind of emotional depth. To be identifying with someone like Rizzo I think is strange for a lot of people who who aren’t like me. And so that’s something I really want to explore, giving depth to this kind of maleness that is very problematic in a ton of ways, exploring where it could be coming from for this specific character.
JA: Rizzo is very American in his optimism, in his ingenuity, in his television consumption, and in his spirit. One thing he seems to desire more than anything else is freedom. You write, “he wanted to be the kid wandering the woods in freedom again, the wind dragging sticks through the leaves. He wanted those days, those days alone and free.” This feels slightly different than the bumper sticker kind of freedom we associate with patriotism.
AS: There’s a physical freedom that the book is interested in, that I’m interested in, and that I was trying to really get at with Rizzo. Not this idea of someone who is entitled or feels entitled to something and who’s unable to have it, but rather someone who’s able to really appreciate the small details of reality. The beauty of that increasingly becomes rare as you age, to sit on the grass alone at night like you do as a kid. For somebody like Rizzo, freedom is just—all of the normal American symbols apply, but with that comes this more sentimental freedom, which is existential, and it’s like, “I am an individual, and what does that actually mean?” And there’s something kind of terrifying about that, but it’s also invigorating, right? And it makes you feel alive to have that awareness.
JA: That reminds me of the parts of your book that are engaged with this idea of agita, which also comes from this place of physicality. You describe it as “rage and anguish… a deep burn in [the] chest.” You are an Italian American. Did agita play a role in your life before this novel?
AS: The short answer is yes. Everyone in my family says this all the time. And it made me think, I can imagine an understanding of agita that’s an Italian American version of a kind of existential Kierkegaard angst that’s like, now I have this fucking heartburn because you’re killing me, you’re killing me emotionally. And so it’s played a huge part in my life. My wife says it now because she’s heard so many people in my family say it.
JA: It’s a physical manifestation of an emotional experience.
AS: It’s an emotional experience that you don’t have a language for, so you try to make something to explain it. And that challenges notions of freedom because you can’t control what you feel all the time. And you have to reckon with that, and especially if you’re performing a type of masculinity where you’re not supposed to show it, then you’re always not free, because you’re not showing this emotional experience. So it’s this thing that you’re not in control of and by not showing it you are denying yourself freedom.
JA: The headline the New York Times ran with at the top of their review of this book was “Who Says a Novel About Guns and Opioids Can’t Be Funny?” What inspired you to write a book about guns and opioids? And why did you make it so funny?
AS: I think humor is a huge part of who I am. It’s how I deal with things and how I make sense of the world. To me, the more tragic something is, the funnier you have to be about it, because what else can you do? I feel like guns and opioids are both these insurmountable forces stacked against people. I was really interested in the way that guns are controlled compared to drugs. You can walk into a store and easily buy a shotgun, but you can’t walk into a store and buy heroin, and we punish people a lot for having drugs, and we don’t really punish a large percentage of the population for having guns. The tension between those two things felt really interesting to me. They felt connected in a really important way that I wanted to look at.
JA: Later in the novel, the real estate tycoon Buford Bellum, who sold Rizzo his store, has a kind of transformation and hatches a plan to create “transcendence centers” in which a client can be guided through an induced fentanyl overdose in order to experience death before being revived with naloxone.
AS: One of the arguments people give against handing out Narcan is that it’s going to encourage people to overdose. There are these videos I saw probably in 2012 or 2013, I don’t know how real it was, but a guy shoots up his partner, she appears to overdose, and then he revives her. It’s content, right? And they were doing it as like, porn almost, that’s how it looked. Death as an industry is something we don’t think about being exploited but it is, all the time. And it’s just an absurd extension, or a kind of absurd commitment to that logic. “I want to solve a problem for you that you don’t have, and then things could go really wrong, but that’s okay as long as I get my money up front for it.”
JA: Nick has this existential moment before deciding to help his dad sell guns and he asked the question, “What is right? Is it right for my dad to sell guns?” He seems to decide that if selling guns provides material stability for his dad, then that wins out over the morality of the situation. It’s a question that’s at the center of this book. What led you to pose and engage with that question?
We’re playing a game that’s designed to be lost. We’re not winning, no matter what.
AS: To make a living, you have to ask yourself that, and I think a lot of us are doing that on a day-to-day basis, even subconsciously. It shows how rigged the system is, where you have to sacrifice something that’s really important to you that shouldn’t be negotiable, which is your character. But to not do so is to put yourself physically at risk of things. And it’s much more complicated than that—there’s a step between selling guns and being in dire physical danger, but I think for some people who maybe don’t feel like they have a ton of options, you have to make those hard choices. It’s just another sign of how things are rigged against us. We’re playing a game that’s designed to be lost. We’re not winning, no matter what. Even if we feel like we are for a little bit.
JA: There’s this other quote I had written down where Nick’s talking to the priest and he says, “What happens if you act in a way that you know is wrong, but you believe in what is right?”
AS: When people say intentions don’t matter, I think that’s bullshit. I think your intentions do matter. They don’t excuse your actions, but they matter. Your sincere intentions matter. What’s bullshit is when someone retroactively tries to say that they were well-intentioned when they weren’t.
JA: Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of fear in this novel. Rizzo is very afraid to die. He asks Nick for any kind of clues about the afterlife after Nick overdoses and Nick doesn’t give him any. He’s also afraid of the legacy he will or will not leave behind when he does die. Why do you think Rizzo is so afraid?
AS: I think it’s ultimately part of wanting to know he succeeded in life, and feeling like he didn’t is a desire for there to be something more. His dissatisfaction with his life causes him to want something beyond this. I mean, I’m absolutely terrified of that. How should we live our lives if we’re to take that reality seriously? When people minimize death, it feels condescending and disrespectful. To just say, “everybody dies, it’s biological,” that’s not comforting to me, that’s never been comforting to me. And I want to explore that idea with Rizzo too, to ask, “What is there? What can I come to terms with?”
