Alexander Sammartino’s debut novel, Last Acts, is a tragicomedy in two acts. The first is set in an antediluvian 2014. David Rizzo, the owner of a faltering gun shop at the tumbleweedish edge of Phoenix, brings on board his son, Nick, a recovering heroin addict savvy in digital marketing, in an attempt to resuscitate Rizzo’s Firearms. Together—as only Estragon and Vladimir or Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are “together”—David and Nick embark on an absurd and earnest quest: to save their gun shop by saving lives. “Every time you buy a gun from us,” Nick says in the shop’s commercial (included in the novel as a screenplay), “we’ll donate a percentage of the sale to a local rehab center, halfway house, or NA chapter.” Inevitably, disaster ensues. (See act II.)

If we’ve known that when we buy something, we’re really buying in, Sammartino shows us that when we sell something, we’re buying in too. He should know: He worked as an account executive in the healthcare technology and financial software industries while writing the novel. Born in Rhode Island and raised in Arizona, he has spent the last 12 years in New York State, first at Syracuse University as an undergraduate and MFA student and now in New York City, where we met at an event hosted by our program. We didn’t overlap at Syracuse, but we had a mutual friend, Jackson Frons, and a mutual mentor, Dana Spiotta, and we hit it off. Our conversation for Public Books took place on Zoom in November 2023, and our conversations since (at a March 2024 event at Grey Matter Books, and over tacos the following July), have informed our revision of the dialogue below.

Angelo Hernandez Sias (AHS): At the start of Last Acts, David Rizzo is about to shutter his gun shop when his son, Nick, miraculously survives an overdose. David sees Nick’s survival as a sign that Rizzo’s Firearms might also live. His attempt to reboot sets the narrative into motion, because it brings Nick—his new business partner—back into his life. Is this the kernel you began with?

Alexander Sammartino (AS): The start was much more vague. I knew I wanted to write something about a father and a son. But I kept returning to this thing about a group of friends who were making their own version of the show Intervention. A comedy in which friends who were all addicts wanted to show an entrepreneurial spirit and become rich off their own exploitation. I saw a connection between this and the father-son element. That’s really where Nick’s character and some of the plot came from.

AHS: One of your minor characters says Intervention is really a show about betrayal: “Intervention? How do we expect people to ‘recover’ after it’s revealed that everyone they love has been engaged in a lie on TV? Maybe it’s the families who agree to go on Intervention who have a disease.”

AS: That’s very much my humor. It’s horrible and absurd. There’s an inversion of victimhood that feels unexpected in that context and not totally innocent. It’s also representative of a larger concern in the book: the consequences of our cultural moment being defined by the intersection of visual media and extreme suffering. The show Intervention is one example, but there’s no shortage. I find it fascinating that we turn to this artificial mediation for help and healing, and I want to look at what it’s like once the show ends. (The distrust, the paranoia, the performance.)

Going back to where the idea for the book came from, I had this line early on: “They will pay for your reality.” It was a guiding phrase for Nick as he looked to profit from how he represented his own addiction. I ended up cutting it because I think what it evokes is obvious in exchanges between David and Nick.

AHS: Who is the “they” and what is the “reality” that you’re referring to?

AS: The “they” are the advertisers, the media platforms, the viewers, the consumers. The “reality” is a version of Nick’s own as a heroin addict in recovery, specifically an extremely bleak, one-dimensional vision of his addiction. The media ecosystem pays out for doom, basically. But the line is heavy-handed, and that’s why I cut it.

AHS: One of the novel’s central problems comes into play when one of David’s customers commits a mass shooting—an unusual one, insofar as no one is killed. After the shooting, Felicia, who owns a pool supply business next to Rizzo’s Firearms, can no longer separate her friend David Rizzo from David Rizzo, seller of arms to a mass shooter. The novel seems to be asking what role politics should have in personal relationships.

AS: Felicia’s politics are never detailed in a tedious or explicit way in the book, but she’s shown to be friends with Rizzo early on while also casually telling him that she thinks his views on guns are dangerous. After she loses someone close to her, she feels this greater sense of guilt and responsibility. She doesn’t lose them to gun violence, but this personal loss makes her question her convictions, and therefore her identity, and becomes a reason to take political action.

This was something I became more aware of during the 2016 election. I’m sure this has always been the case, political action coming out of not directly related personal loss, but I felt like the political became a way to redeem the personal at a time when the internet was (and is) responsible for the hollowing of both.

It was important to me that Felicia’s politics not seem easily reducible to just an idea, and the same with Rizzo’s. But, yes, the book is definitely considering what responsibility we have for actions—and, therefore, our relationships—if we take our beliefs seriously, and what responsibility we then have to each other. Rizzo is surprised by Felicia’s protests against his gun store, and Felicia feels, after the death of someone close to her, that she has no choice but to act consistently with her beliefs. She feels guilty for something she had no control over, and part of how she survives is by trying to participate more fully in things, to take action. Both sides are in quandaries. That seems like the state of being an American. The country is divided, so how do you love someone on the other side?

AHS: Let’s talk about another vital aspect of your novel: setting. Desert landscapes figure heavily. Arizona in your hands is like Dublin in Joyce’s. I’m curious what draws you to the state. How do you think about its geography? What keeps you writing about it?

AS: It’s definitely a preoccupation. I lived there for a long time: moved there when I was a kid, started college out there. My parents live there; same with my sister and her kids. It’s a fascinating place, has grown so fast, has no seasons, feels apocalyptic but is also beautiful. And the drama of the physical landscape challenges the language. There are multiple histories in tension visually just on either side of the freeway. And, Arizona being a border state, there’s this eternal question being asked about what it means to be an American. It’s a setting with a lot at stake.

AHS: Last Acts is broken into two parts of roughly equal length. The first part is set in 2014 and the second part in 2017. I was wondering what led to that split?

AS: I didn’t want Last Acts to be set strictly after the 2016 election. I worried that if the novel was set only after Trump took office then the concern would seem reducible to his presidency, and that’s obviously, and unfortunately, not true. We’ve been dealing with a reckless gun culture and the opioid epidemic (along with many other horrible and unfortunate things) for much longer, far too long.

But it also felt dishonest not to consider how different things have been since that election, and that Trump’s presidency continues to have real negative consequences for issues like gun control. The Supreme Court—with one-third of its justices appointed by him—just officially undid what may have been his greatest achievement as president: banning bump stocks (which are very easy to buy and add to AR-15s; they make semiautomatic rifles basically fully automatic). The Las Vegas shooter used those when he killed more than five dozen people.

AHS: How do you think about form in this novel?

AS: Generally in two ways. First is on the level of the line. I like to think that there’s a true construction of a sentence. There’s an ideal shape for an individual sentence—in terms of sound, syntax, rhythm, the relationship of these features to its content—that needs to be figured out through all sorts of addition and subtraction and arrangement and rearrangement, so I mess around with an individual line until I feel like that’s been achieved. That’s all very mysterious and melodramatic, but it helps me work and maintain a sense of play while also focusing on improving the smallest units. As a writer, I believe the sentence is the first responsibility. Without that, there’s nothing. In Last Acts, the goal was to have each sentence be in its needed and best possible form, which would hopefully sustain a particular energy for the whole novel.

The second way I think about form is in terms of large-scale pattern: not just one sentence, but the relationships between collections of sentences: paragraphs, chapters, and sections. Similar to the sentence, in my own guiding aesthetic ideals, there’s an overarching patterning that is natural and necessary to the content.

For Last Acts, because this is a father-son book, I wanted there to be a structure of repetition with slight variation, of near symmetry. I didn’t have all of this in my head when I started out, and this sounds much neater than it actually is, but as I worked I knew I wanted it in two parts: father, son. The second section, which is largely from Nick’s perspective, has twice as many chapters as the first, which is largely from Rizzo’s perspective, so the shape feels like it has grown out of (duplicated) Rizzo’s section. Another example: throughout the book there are chapters where the pair just sit across from each other trying to speak, but as the book goes on, the chapters vary in their proportion of dialogue and description until the very end when—without giving away too much!—they’ve both arrived in this sort of metaphysical space that looks different on the page than prior chapters. The formal feature grows and changes with them. I’m very lucky to work with someone like my editor, Rebekah Jett, who is extremely encouraging and helpful in these formal discussions.

AHS: In Last Acts, there are text messages, voicemails, tweets. Sometimes I felt the presence of what Hugh Kenner, in an essay on Ulysses, calls the “arranger”—like when you juxtapose news clippings from CNN and Fox. Or when we see Nick Rizzo’s tweets for a sham hospice company juxtaposed with, say, updates about mass shootings. What appeals to you about this multiplicity of forms? How do you maintain control when all forms are at your fingertips?

AS: It’s somewhat conventional now to do this, I think, but, going back to my last answer, I try to look for a connection between the narrative and those formal qualities so it communicates something and feels deliberate. One way that played out in the book is that Nick’s section is much more fragmented, with white space within chapters. Rizzo’s section uses short chapters too, but there are no space breaks within individual chapters. Rizzo’s consciousness is informed by television: there’s the fragmentation of flipping channels but less chaos there than his son’s interior landscape, which has been formed by the internet.

Sometimes the goal of including a range of texts is dislocation. In Nick’s section, for example, I take the hashtag ad language but apply it to guns. I want to create that “defamiliarization,” a sense of strangeness about guns being presented as products.

AHS: The novel’s epigraph is from Heidegger: “Man does not merely stray into errancy. He’s always astray in errancy.” Sartre makes a cameo; Rizzo’s uncle claims Sartre (“J. P. was what we called him”) stole the concept of agita and renamed it nausea. What draws you to the existentialists? What is the novel’s relationship to philosophy?

AS: I feel that way every day of my life: “astray in errancy.” I think that’s about being human. So I was moved when I came across those sentences about living in error. I’m definitely not a Heidegger scholar, but he seems like a philosopher who contributed so much to the field but was also very wrong about a few things, such as his choice to join the Nazis. The idea of living in error feels humbling in itself, but especially from him.

In terms of the book, Rizzo and Nick are in the gun business but want to “do good.” All the characters in Last Acts are flawed and ambitious, to their own detriments. I think that’s true of myself and lots of other people, and I see it as a reason for humility and kindness.

I was a philosophy major in college but didn’t grow up having any sense of what academic philosophy was. The first time I was aware of this as a field of study came in my sophomore-year community college class on public speaking; we had a substitute one day who taught philosophy, and instead of talking about public speaking, he gave a lecture about ethics and the trolley car problem [a fictional scenario in which an onlooker has to choose whether to save five people from being hit by a trolley by sacrificing just one]. That was my way in. When I actually took a philosophy class, I was struck by how these specialized conversations had been happening all around me my entire life, but no one ever said, “Okay, we’re doing philosophy now, so buckle up, pal!” You mentioned Uncle Gio, and his lecture on agita is the perfect example of this, something I’d heard my whole life from my mom and others and then saw (in both a comedic and an intellectual way) as philosophic. The appearance of Uncle Gio in the book, though, probably owes more to Roth than Heidegger. He (Roth) helped me see this family-member philosopher as a worthwhile literary subject.

AHS: How would you describe agita?

AS: Heartburn or internal agitation that causes anxiety. In Uncle Gio’s view, this type of chest pain makes you aware of being a material thing, and as a result, question your purpose.

AHS: Speaking of philosophical forms: Chapter 35 presents a series of aphorisms on the market. One that sticks with me: “To market is not merely to sell. To market is to generate a system in which any form of transaction, including a sale, can occur. Therefore, the market is a liberated world, an atmosphere of relentless exchange, where one finds it impossible to conceive of the opposite of a transaction.”

It seems like one of your obsessions is with people who buy in, and pay for it. Last Acts, and to some extent your Joyland story “Testarossa,” ask how someone might come back from being conned. How do you think about the language that marketing deploys? What happens to language in a marketing context?

AS: I think the language is often fun in some way, which can be why it’s effective, which is terrifying. The language has a very specific goal, a very specific way to be understood, a specific audience, and “call to action”—buy this shit—and wants to control what you think. That’s a very paranoid uncle way to put it, but that’s who I am, a paranoid uncle. There’s that line in Godard’s Made in U.S.A: “Advertising is a form of fascism.” Marketing is more dangerous than advertising, I think. It’s deliberately more ambiguous and inclusive in its methods.

AHS: Your characters are interested in that point where speech asymptotes, where it comes up against this knoll that can’t be reached and there’s something inexpressible. I wrote down a line from “Testarossa” where the narrator describes sitting with his sister-in-law as “knowing there was nothing more to say, yet waiting for the other to speak.”

This reminded me of Nick Rizzo in conversation—or lack thereof—with his dad, David Rizzo. Nick wants to speak more to his father, but David shuts him down: “What is there to talk about?” What attracts you to these moments of silence?

AS: I think applying the language toward its own absence is one way to enact a method. It’s an opportunity to put the language under pressure and hopefully create something that feels true. The most terrifying things resist language; same with the most mundane and beautiful things. I want to feel the tension in the language, because that’s where the life is. 

Featured image: Photograph of Alexander Sammartino courtesy of the author.