"Last Acts"

Alexander Sammartino lives in Brooklyn. He received his MFA from Syracuse University.

He applied the Page 69 Test to Last Acts, his first novel, and reported the following:

Page 69 in Last Acts is formatted like a screenplay. There’s dialogue, there are many parenthetical directions. At this point the novel’s main characters—the hapless and ambitious father-son duo, David and Nick Rizzo—after many failed takes filming a television commercial for their gun shop, Rizzo’s Firearms, agree to embark on one more take, even after their most recent attempt devolved into a brief exchange of punches. Page 69 concludes with a parenthetical that describes the pair turning toward each other, and this minor movement is repeated as the footage is fast-forwarded and then rewound, ending on the one-word sentence: “Pause.”

Somehow, in an incredibly strange coincidence, this page alone provides an accurate feel for the entirety of Last Acts. The father-son dynamic, the structural range, the isolated language. The dark comedy. The focus on repetition. (Like father, like son.) That final word, Pause, is especially telling: throughout the book the characters begin to slow down more, becoming increasingly present in their own lives.

The screenplay structure of this chapter, which ends on page 69, was central to the book from the very first draft. The book examines the sometimes necessary but always stressful notion of performance—the performance of being male, of appearing successful, of seeming like a happy family, of being in recovery—and this is the first time that the text directly calls attention to this idea through its form. This is also the chapter, I feel, when Nick Rizzo becomes his own character with an identity separate from that of his father. Until this point, his father has been the primary subject of the novel, and much of Nick’s struggles as a newly sober person who recently overdosed have been mediated through the perspective of his father. Here, however, in a well-meaning but poorly executed attempt to save the family business, Nick reveals something deeper than previously seen about who he is.

Visit Alexander Sammartino's website.

--Marshal Zeringue