LULU INCOGNITO

by Raymond Kennedy ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1988

A humble shopgirl is plucked from obscurity by an embittered grande dame in Kennedy's fifth novel, a Jamesian study of manipulation and corruption. The shopgirl is the 21-year-old Lulu, who tends the candy-counter at a five-and-dime in a Massachusetts factory town, lives with her mother in a tenement, is a devout Catholic and a pathologically shy loner. In the spring of 1951, she is spotted by Leon Rafferty, a debonair satellite of the town's most socially prominent resident, the imperious Mrs. Julia Gansevoort. After deciding that Lulu is properly malleable, he delivers her to the Gansevoort residence, where, as Julia's companion, dressed in the clothes of Julia's dead daughter, she is transformed into ""a mere extension"" of Mrs. Gansevoort. Though pathetically grateful to her benefactress, Lulu is aware of the ""deep vein of cold resentment"" in her. And the Gansevoort closets, it turns out, are rattling with skeletons. Thirty years before, sister Ignatia stole Julia's sweetheart; now Julia is executing a terrible reprisal against Ignatia's children, Chloris and Douglas. She has already terrified her doll-like niece into total submission; her next plan, as the action moves to her summer home in the mountains, is to destroy Douglas, a Yale graduate. Lulu is to serve as the bait who will arouse Douglas' passion, then destroy it through a carefully staged embrace of Rafferty; though aware of ""the corruption passing in waves through her"" during the climactic kiss, Lulu is powerless to stop her role in the deception. Afterward, her usefulness at an end, the disoriented wretch rushes into the woods and drowns herself. The eerie power of the close comes too late to save a novel that is too slow, too contrived, and too hung up on the uninteresting Lulu (pathos can go only so far).

Pub Date: March 1, 1988

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Vintage/Random House

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1988

Categories: FICTION