Last Acts
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • Winner of the 2025 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award • National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree • Shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction • “The rarest of things, an authentically tender portrait of father and son...Magnificently humane.” —The Irish Times • “Hilarious, exceptional.” —The New York Times Book Review
A riotous, irreverent yet big-hearted debut novel about a broke father-son duo who go all-in on some of America’s deadliest obsessions.
Even though his firearms store is failing, things are looking up for David Rizzo. His son, Nick, has just recovered after a near-fatal overdose, which means one thing: Rizzo can use Nick’s resurrection to create the most compelling television commercial for a gun emporium the world has ever seen. After all, this is America, Rizzo tells himself. Surely anything is possible. But the relationship between father and son is fragile, mired in mutual disappointment. And when the pair embarks on their scheme to avoid bankruptcy, a high-stakes crash of hijinks, hope, and disaster ensues.
Featuring a cast of unforgettable characters and “honest, high-wire virtuosic writing” (George Saunders) this razor-sharp social satire “pays tribute to gallows humorists like Sam Lipsyte, Gary Shteyngart, Jonathan Tropper, and Jonathan Franzen” (Chicago Review of Books).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sammartino's acerbic debut revolves around a troubled father and son in a desolate part of Phoenix, Ariz. David Rizzo's 30-year-old son, Nick, who's on the rebound from a heroin overdose, agrees to help his father turn around his latest failing business, a gun shop in an industrial wasteland. They devise a marketing scheme involving a pledge to donate a percentage of the store's proceeds to a drug rehab center, with Nick acting as the campaign's poster boy. It works, until a school shooting dampens interest in gun sales. Sammartino spices up the shaggy dog narrative with a transcript of the Rizzos' various failed attempts to make a TV commercial ("NICK remains in front of wall, but his smile fades, replaced by a glazed stare. He fidgets") and social media posts Nick writes for a hospice in an effort to raise more cash ("Dying is hard. We make it easy"; "never die alone again #unity"). 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.
