The year is 2014 as Alex Sammartino’s debut novel Last Acts begins, and David Rizzo’s gun store is failing. Why? For one, Rizzo’s Firearms is stuck in a strip mall on the farthest outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona. To steer customers toward it, he uses landmarks such as a distinctive saguaro and a “splayed quail corpse.” Additionally, Rizzo, a white man pushing sixty, has not kept up with the times. He is fumbling and well-intentioned, a gun-selling Homer Simpson, and customers, when they come into the store at all, trust online reviews and message-board posts more than the schlubby charms of the man behind the counter.

Hope appears in the form of David’s adult son, Nick, with his skills in “SEO, SEM, CRM drips,” and other twenty-first-century dark arts. Together they hatch a plan to exploit Nick’s ongoing recovery from opioid addiction as part of a store rebranding. On camera, Nick describes his near-fatal heroin overdose before executing the company’s pivot to “shooting opioid addiction dead,” which includes a promise to donate a percentage of all sales to such causes. The video goes viral, and business booms. At the cash register, without fail, people tell the Rizzos stories of those they knew whose lives were changed — or ended — by excessive opioid use. “They wanted to do good,” the narrator says, of these people who saw the commercial and came to buy bullets, “but settled for what was better than nothing.”

This inciting incident deftly winds together so many threads comprising the present moment in the United States: continually radicalizing gun culture, the bleakness of the opioid epidemic, economic precarity, consumption as the center of politics, virality and online confession as necessities for success. With its roving narrator and a contingency-soaked plot cataloging ever-changing fortunes, Last Acts attempts to metabolize as much confusion and suffering in southwestern exurbia as it can. The novelist Dan Chaon, in a recent New York Times book review, wrote that Sammartino’s satire had “cracked the code” in writing about the contemporary United States. The ambition is stimulating — and the ways the novel falls short are worth analyzing.