In Alexander Sammartino’s Last Acts, a father and son donate a portion of their struggling gun business’s profits to the war against drugs, thus becoming the first ammunition store in America dedicated to “shooting addiction dead”. This is a tale about losers; Rizzo is addicted to television and his son Nick to heroin, and even the school shooting – inevitable in this story – kills no one. The novel manoeuvres through opioids, the working class and masculinity, topics twitchy enough to make anyone ignite. Exhilaratingly, it elicits belly laughs and pathos, and is astute in a manner that, while cynical, is never cruel.
Rizzo’s Firearms is located off the 101 in an Arizona strip mall, where “a CVS next to a Quizno’s next to a Sweet Salad” are surreally set among boulders “traced with purple Chihuahuan sage and fluffs of rosemary” and succulents with “pink-petaled flowers pinched between their glochids”. Sammartino’s language is glorious; original word-choices casually, dazzlingly string together in verbal flights that juxtapose with deadpan (“The shooter even spared himself, surrendering next to a poster in the cafeteria detailing the Heimlich.”) and unadorned moments of heartache. About Rizzo’s ex-wife, Sammartino writes: “There was no fight over the house, no fight over the furniture – she wanted nothing except to leave.”
Finally, Last Acts is the rarest of things, an authentically tender portrait of father and son. Rizzo is Italian-American machismo overflowing with motherly sentiment, stocking up on orange juice, granola bars and salami when Nick overdoses. Exasperated, Rizzo says, “How about a simple-thank you for a father who goes out of his way to make sure you have snacks? How many recovering drug addicts have snacks?”. Nick is just as prone to feeling about his father, mourning a time when they once “sat across from each other and talked as if the table existed only to hold up their speech”.
Last Acts has echoes of American cinema and stage – Arthur Miller meets the Coen Brothers and James Gandolfini – but it tweaks you with the preciseness that only the written word can achieve. Just as Rizzo’s Firearms is, “in essence, like any other store”, Rizzo and Nick are like any other sad sacks, longing for the cliches that comprise the national dream. In this magnificently humane book, they are made extraordinary, old-fashioned heroes riding their spluttering Eldorado Cadillac like Don Quixote’s donkey, with hopes and chivalry as expansive as their hearts.
