Joseph Torra Tony Luongo

Annotation

Tony Luongo, top salesman of major appliances in Pratt's department store, Somerville, Massachusetts, is on the shop floor at just the right time. It's the mid-sixties, consumer demand for new domestic goods seems insatiable, relations with staff at the store are free and easy, and Luongo, who has refined his sales technique to an art form, can shift more vacuum cleaners than anyone. Then Luongo falls for Audrey. They marry, have kids, start a family, and the seventies arrive, with the recession, followed by the spread of Aids - and for Luongo, constantly battling with the legacies, tensions, drives and desires that spring, in part, from his own upbringing, it's a time when tough choices have to be made ...Joseph Torra, a major new American voice, once again explores the lives of a post-war Italian-American family, in a brilliant, expansive and fast-flowing narrative that has echoes of another working-class son of Massachusetts, Jack Kerouac.