66 Laps A Novel - Hardcover

Leslie Lehr

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375503846 ISBN 13: 9780375503849

Publisher: Villard, 2000

Synopsis

I slipped off my clothes and dove into the pool. We are 96 percent liquid. There is nothing more sensuous than a good splash against naked skin: the initial rush of cold, the smooth acquiescence of inner fluid to the outer mantle of wet.

Thirty-two-year-old Audrey Hastings swims a mile each day in her backyard pool: sixty-six laps. These meticulously counted crossings are the balm for her frustrations as a new mother, and her hedge against the insecurity she feels upon discovering her first gray hair. But the smooth waters through which she so assiduously glides grow cloudy when it becomes crystal clear that her good-looking, easy-going husband has begun an affair with a comely co-worker named Kim--who resembles Audrey, ten years younger.
        Audrey rages and stews and swims while contemplating this threat to her very existence. A fan-tasy of revenge--taking a younger lover of her own--becomes real when Audrey catches the eye of a sexy grad student at the park where she takes her two-year-old, Gina, to play.
        Audrey hesitates, resists, succumbs. And Au-drey learns that the consequences of jealousy, suspicion, and adultery can be more disastrous than she ever imagined.
        Precise, intelligent, and intense, 66 Laps is an altogether irresistible novel written with scalpel-like precision.

About this title

Review

Leslie Lehr Spirson's first novel is an old-fashioned morality tale set in contemporary suburban Los Angeles. At the age of 32, Audrey Hastings appears to have it all: a hunky, attentive husband, Jim; a sweet and precocious daughter; a comfortable house with a "small, but perfect" yard. Yet out in the pool where she swims her daily mile, Audrey allows her thoughts to roam below the placid surface of her life, where they linger upon the daily frustrations and insecurities that rapidly conspire to threaten her marriage.

No sooner has she discovered her first gray hairs and tiny crows feet than Audrey begins to suspect Jim of having an affair with his twentysomething assistant, Kim: "Am I sharing him? Did these hands touch her? Is he fighting to keep my name at his lips?" Wounded and obsessed, she strikes up a flirtation with a handsome grad student and soon dives headfirst into a fling of her own. Although Audrey believes that there is hope for her marriage, the fallout from her affair is irreversible and nightmarish, and she ultimately learns that betrayal begins not with the body, but in the mind.

Written in vivid prose and punchy, abbreviated chapters, 66 Laps infuses a familiar domestic landscape with intensity and suspense, focusing on the private moments of satisfaction and doubt that define--and disturb--married life. --Svenja Soldovieri

From the Back Cover

"The prose is luminous and passionate, and
the story of Audrey's season of doubt and love is irresistible and ultimately heartbreaking. The author knows what Tolstoy knew, that it's the simple, ordinary life that is the most terrible, the most tragic, the most compelling. The story is about the new monogamy, the old infidelity, about the power we give to strangers and the fragility of intimacy. It's about dreams and nightmares, betrayal and seduction. The voice is engaging, the characters memorable and moving, the subject important. You can't trust a woman in love, Audrey tells us. Indeed. 66 Laps reminded me of why I started reading stories in the first place: to be enchanted, to live in a world that is more vivid and more compelling than the one I come from."

--John Dufresne, author of Love Warps the

Mind a Little and Louisiana Power & Light

About this edition

• Publisher: Villard
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0375503846
• ISBN 13: 9780375503849
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224