Last Acts: An Interview
Alexander Sammartino | Last Acts | Scribner | January 2024 | 224 Pages
When I arrived at the Syracuse MFA program, I heard a lot about Alexander Sammartino. He was, apparently, a former Arizona high school football star, an amateur bodybuilder, an otherworldly reader, and a prodigious cigarette smoker (he’s since quit). Although he’d already graduated, a former professor put us in touch and we bonded over books, sports, and being Italian. A half-decade later, the rest, as they say, is history.
As a writer, Sammartino is obsessed with the sentence, but not blinded by it. His prose pulses with a staccato cadence that echoes his influences (DeLillo, Spiotta, Saunders), but that rings singularly his own. “Saved, yes.” begins his debut, Last Acts, a novel that elides pinning down. This is a novel full of sentences that, as Garielle Lutz wrote in her seminal essay “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” exhibit “a vivid extremity of language, an abruption, a definitive inquietude.” Sammartino is deeply invested in the novel’s microscopic instances of language.
Even so, Last Acts is a novel just as concerned with its macro-structure.. Told in mirrored split perspective—first David Rizzo and then his son Nick—and interspersed with pop-up ads, news clips, and posts, it’s a sprawling, distinctly American novel, in a deceptively small package. It’s a story about guns where no one gets shot. It’s hilarious, but not at the expense of emotion. It’s a book concerned with stunted men who burble with agita.
At its heart, however, Last Acts is the story of a father and son—David and Nick Rizzo. After Nick, the son, flatlines and nearly dies from a heroin overdose, David, the father, in possession of a gun shop on its last legs, sees a marketing ploy that might grant them a mutual salvation. When their bootstrapped commercial goes gun-world viral, the Rizzo’s enjoy brief success until a botched mass shooting (the Mass Survival) perpetrated with a gun sold from the shop sends David to prison, and their lives back into a spiral of distinctly American calamities. Set against the backdrop of the Arizona desert, Last Acts is a novel that deeply and intimately reckons with contemporary American masculinity, but without a trace of bravado or heroism. These are bumbling, failing, desperate men.
In an email conversation that touched on guns, football, and slam poetry, Sammartino and I kept coming back to language—its limits, the role of the novel, and what it means to be an artist who’s trying to be funny.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Jackson Frons: What was the initial seed for Last Acts?
Alexander Sammartino: It’s tough for me to say exactly what came first. I knew I wanted to write a father and son story. Specifically, I wanted to write a story where a father and son were trying to talk to each other but failing to do so.
JF: I’m glad you brought up the failure of communication. I’m thinking about the line “If emotion defined life, Rizzo now considered himself excessively alive.” I sometimes think the only shared American (or maybe, at least, Italian-American) value is an excessive amount of feeling, poorly expressed. I’d love to hear more about your approach to feeling and repression here.
AS: I think it depends on how we’re defining emotion and how apathy fits in, but in terms of approach—I try to foreground feeling as much as possible. When I’m lost as I’m working, that’s where I remind myself to focus. It seems obvious, and it is obvious to everyone except me, but it took me a long time to embrace that in my work. I’m especially interested in the way that extreme feeling within a character inflects the language. Bresson said that the goal for his films was to move from the exterior to the interior, and I feel like in my work, more and more, I’m using the interior to inflect the exterior.
JF: On the subject of the exterior, let’s talk about the desert, and Arizona, particularly. I know you spent some formative years there—what does that place and its culture mean to you as a writer?
AS: So much, man. It’s dramatic. It’s something that you’re always aware of. No matter what you’re doing, you turn around and there is earth towering around you. There’s this, like, inherent religiosity in that awareness. It’s how I think some people talk about the sublime: beauty plus terror.
Culturally… I don’t know what I necessarily mean by culturally, nor do I think I can speak for the culture, and I’m probably walking on land mines here, but I feel like Phoenix changed so much so quickly, especially over the last five or so decades. Politically, it exists in a state of tension. The idea of citizenship is constant. It’s a destination. And the politics of the border mean that people are constantly trying to define what it means to be an American there. It’s a place that will always mean a lot to me.
JF: Last Acts deals with some Big American Themes. Let’s talk about guns. Have you shot a gun before? I only have once (ironically in the Nevada desert) and found the experience to be alternately terrifying, profound, and hilarious.
AS: I have shot guns. What surprised me most about the experience was how easily a weapon can be fired. I don’t mean accurately, but just to shoot, as in mechanically, as in physically. This is an object designed to make killing easier. Which is frightening on its own, but even more so when you consider that it’s harder to use far less dangerous objects.
JF: I’m interested in the formal breaks in Last Acts—the digital ads, the news reports—I’m curious about your broader structural approach here. Particularly in how you’re able to evoke the thematic scale of a much more sprawling novel in a tighter, more fragmented package.
AS: I wanted to represent the reality of two different characters through the technology that was most important to them. Focus on the ways their relationships to TV and the internet alter presentations of consciousness.
For Rizzo, most of the chapters in his section don’t have space breaks and move linearly. But with Nick, as a guy who grew up online, the chapters display extreme fragmentation, the transitions are much more abrupt and reflect a prevailing anxiety and doubt.
I’ve become anti-sprawling novel. It feels less special now, when we’re constantly bombarded with an excess of information. I’m more interested in absence, in what an artist chooses to exclude.
JF: What do you think the role of the novel is in the 21st century?
AS: I think its role is to have no role. The novel is utterly useless to our current moment in history. DeLillo has talked about this, considered the idea in Mao II, and I think he’s right: it’s liberating. There’s no pressure. I can take risks formally, I can be provocative. It’s of such little consequence that I feel guilty, like I’m spending my adult life acting like a little kid.
JF: Do you think at all about how readers will interact with your work?
AS: In a way. I think of myself as the first reader, and I trust myself to make decisions that, if they work for me, will also satisfy readers who think like me. But I don’t want to limit potential responses. This is one of the reasons I prefer not to talk about my work, about what it means to me: I don’t want to limit the experience for someone else. But then I worry that my reluctance to speak about the work seems like a lack of self-awareness, and maybe it is, but I want people to have their own responses and to not qualify those responses.
JF: Were there any novels you kept returning to while working on this book?
AS: Yeah man—Christine Schutt’s Florida, I was really floored by how she can sustain that voice and lyricism for an entire novel. Nabokov, definitely about the language too, but in Pnin he does such a good job of joking about Pnin while still taking him very seriously, he creates a character who feels real. White Noise has the humor, it’s so funny, and the writing—especially the lists—are incredible. In all of Dana Spiotta’s work I feel like she’s able to bring it all together, the sleek construction of the novel with the emotional depth, and that’s what I aim to do, that’s the goal, the high standard.
JF: You’re such a funny writer, but the humor comes from, I think, a place of sincere and serious engagement with your characters. Do you consider yourself a satirist? I know that word has been thrown around a bit in the rollout.
AS: I think of the book as being, at times, satirical, but not being a work of satire, the distinction being that the end goal of Last Acts is not one-dimensional, not cartoony, not just to create a satire. I want the satire to contribute to a more expansive artistic experience. I don’t want to be a satirist, I want to be an artist.
The satire in the book is just one form of comedy. There’s also the slapstick, there’s the absurd, there’s the dark comedy, there’s just funny. I don’t know how to live without comedy, without being able to laugh at myself and the world, and I want that to be an important part of my work. I think writing is one of the few places where serious stuff is also funny. I don’t think that happens as much in any other form.
JF: What (or who) are your comedic inspirations? Both from the literary world and otherwise
AS: So, from the literary world: James Tate is possibly the funniest writer I’ve ever read. George Saunders, DeLillo, Pynchon, Barthelme, Nabokov, and Foster Wallace are all up there, too.
For movies it’s dumb stuff that I can’t help but find hilarious. Will Ferrell, I think he’s so funny. I rewatched Stepbrothers a few times last week and it is still awesome. Adam Sandler has been a huge influence on me. Billy Madison—which is essentially an adaption of Barthelme’s “Me and Miss Mandible”—is the Sandman’s best, I think. Steve Coogan is incredible, too.
I also love sketch comedy. That was how I came to writing, I think. I grew up obsessed with Saturday Night Live. My mom and I would watch reruns of SNL on Comedy Central for hours. And in high school my friends and I would always fuck around and try to come up with sketches. I was obsessed with Laser Cats. I remember ditching school one day with some guys and the goal was to come up with our own Laser Cats sequel but we ended up just watching one guy play his older brother’s drum set.
JF: At your New York launch I learned you were, briefly, a college slam poet, which I think may be the polar opposite of being a standup comedian. What did you...slam(?) about?
AS: Well, I wouldn’t consider myself a slam poet. I never competed. I would say I did spoken word, I think that’s more accurate.
Look, I was bad. I knew people who were really good, and I loved watching them perform, so this was just somewhat of an excuse for me to spend time with talented poets. My favorite stuff was, like, watching a dramatic monologue. It was very theater-kid-like.
But I was really into Jim Morrison, and there were these recordings of him doing spoken word, and from that I decided it was okay for me to ramble metaphors that sounded nice but did not hold up under the slightest scrutiny. That’s basically what I did, like try to describe a feeling in what I thought to be very poetic terms. When I started I was not far removed from playing football, so I was like this gigantic dude ranting about being depressed.
I said this at the launch and this is the truth: spoken word taught me how to perform on the page. And it made me very attentive to sound. And it taught me that I am not good at spoken word.
JF: Could you talk a bit about playing football? As a fellow former athlete, I’m curious how that part of your life both practically impacted your approach to making art, and how being immersed in that world has inflected the characters you chose to write about.
AS: I don’t think I’ve fully realized the effect it has had on me yet. But I said this to you many years ago when we went to a Mets game together, I do think the discipline it takes to be a decent athlete transfers over nicely to writing. The hard work is a non-negotiable. You do it, end of story.
But what football also taught me is that you can work very hard and get absolutely nowhere, and that’s by no fault of your own, and that’s okay, and it’s the same with writing. You can get up every day, write for hours, keep a routine for years, and everything you write sucks. I’ve done that. And so I think if you’re going to do something like writing it should be because you love the work. That’s all you’re guaranteed, the work. And, similar to being an athlete, I try to think of this work as a thing for kids, and to keep a certain looseness, and to have fun while I’m working. I feel lucky I get to write. I don’t mean that I get to publish, I’m obviously lucky for that, but just that I can sit at my desk and write, that’s a lucky thing.
The level I’m still trying to understand is how that environment changed me emotionally. In an obvious way, I think it contributed to making me very closed off. I’m still working through that. And that’s a big challenge, because that’s so important to good art: a concerned engagement with emotion. This isn’t a “poor me!” thing, I’m not a victim, I’m just saying it has an effect. I think it’s something I’m actively trying to consider in my writing. I’m interested in men who are struggling to communicate what they feel because they have no language for how they feel.
Alexander Sammartino was born in Rhode Island and grew up in Arizona. He majored in philosophy and English at Syracuse University, which is also where he received his MFA. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and cat. Last Acts is his first novel.