Pay the Piper
A Novel
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- €11.99
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- €11.99
Publisher Description
The electrifying story of a woman whose search for love and fulfillment brings her to the very brink of disaster
Laurel Wynn is haunted by her insecurities. Raised in a backwater Mississippi town by an alcoholic mother, she is now the author of largely ignored novels and the unhappy wife and mother of an upper-middle-class New England family. She continues to hold out hope, however, that the right kind of love might change everything for the better. When she begins a correspondence with Hal MacDonald, a wealthy Mississippian incarcerated for the accidental murder of his stepson, Laurel comes to believe that she has finally found a partner passionate and charismatic enough to make her feel whole.
Enthralled by Hal's ardent letters and their brief jailhouse meetings, Laurel leaves her husband and child to move back to the South. But when Hal is finally released, the fantasy romance she imagined quickly turns into a nightmare. At fifty-three years old, Laurel is in life-threatening danger and must find within herself the courage and the determination not just to survive, but to set herself free once and for all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Williams (The Morning and the Evening, Country Woman) is an accomplished novelist who seems here to have muted a potentially engrossing story. Protagonist Laurel Perry is neurotically insecure about her upbringing on the wrong side of the tracks in Delton, Miss. In addition, she has always felt inferior to her well-bred but philandering husband, and the novels she writes, though well reviewed, do not sell. Lonely and vulnerable, on her annual summer visit to Delton, she falls in love with Hal MacDonald, scion of a socially prominent family, who is in prison for shooting his stepson. Willfully blind to the weaknesses in Hal's characterbesides being a murderer, he is a self-pitying, alcoholic wastrelLaurel convinces herself that she will be the instrument of his rehabilitation. After her divorce, anguished at having to leave her son with his father in Connecticut, Laurel moves with her new, ex-convict husband to his parents' plantation in the Delta, where she immediately realizes she has made a terrible mistake. Hal shows no aptitude or inclination for any kind of work; he beats Laurel; and she finally understands that he is a sociopath. Laurel's passivity and lifelong subservience to men make her a rather colorless character, lacking the animation that might inspire empathy in readers. It is only when she realizes she has thrown away her life, discovers herself alone in middle age and makes muddled attempts to find companionship and happiness that she becomes an appealing figure. At this point the novel acquires depth and poignancy.
