Campaign for the American Reader: Pg. 69: "Charity Girl"

Michael Lowenthal is the author of the novels Charity Girl, Avoidance, and The Same Embrace. His short stories and nonfiction have appeared in most of the best places.

I asked him to apply the "page 69 test" to Charity Girl. Here is what he reported:

Charity Girl is a novel based on a disturbing, little-remembered episode in American history: our government's World War I campaign against women with venereal disease, during which fifteen thousand women were incarcerated in federally funded detention homes, with no formal charges, no trials, and sentences of indefinite duration.

When I stumbled upon this history, I knew I wanted to write about it. But how to make a novel out of bare facts? (I found reports by government officials and social workers but no account by a woman who herself was detained.)

My challenge, then, was to invent a character and the events that would lead her to this frightening end. I dreamed my way to Frieda, a 17-year-old daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants in Boston. She secures a job at a department store and strikes out on her own, escaping her repressive mother and a marriage to a wealthy widower twice her age. Determined to find love on her own terms, she is intoxicated by her new-found freedom and the patriotic fervor of the day. That is, until a soldier reports her as his last sexual contact, sweeping her up in the government's crusade.

To help myself empathize with these long-ago characters, I gave Frieda my grandmother's name, and I gave her soldier beau, Felix, a well-to-do background - and a stately home - similar to my grandfather's.

Page 69 comes at the end Frieda and Felix's one passionate evening together. Felix goads Frieda into taking the wheel of a fancy automobile, the owner of which she believes to be the father of Felix's soldier pal. In the course of this single page, Frieda gets whiplashed from giddy delight (the thrill of driving this stylish car, of having had sex with Felix) to angry disappointment: she finds out the owner's true identity, and this marks the moment of her first betrayal by Felix.

Page 69 is thus an enactment-in-miniature of Frieda's emotional experience throughout the novel. It's a moment whose consequences will hang over the whole story.

The page does include, if glancingly, many of the novel's key elements: the war, Fenway Park, automobiles and driving, differences in social class, romance. It doesn't include: venereal disease or the detention home.

In terms of prose style, it's not a page I'd use to tout my talents. But there are a couple of lines I'm fond of - for example, when Frieda takes a curve at too high a speed: “Up on two tires, the Locomobile teetered. Hanging, hanging, undone.”

Many thanks to Michael for the input.

Read one excerpt or another, and check out this interview.

Among the praise for Charity Girl:

"Lively and illuminating. . . [Lowenthal] has accomplished the difficult feat of marrying the facts of history with the details that make a fictional life come alive. That few readers of Lowenthal's deserving novel will ever have heard of the detention of the 'charity girls' is astonishing. That Lowenthal has made us aware of them is nothing short of a gift."
— Anita Shreve, Washington Post

"Lowenthal's narrative style is perfect for a heroine who suffers but remains a survivor, striking just the right mix of dark and light, worldly and innocent. . . A convincing portrait of a long-lost world."
— New York Times Book Review

"Even while capturing the great sweep of the period, Charity Girl celebrates most the depth of the characters' lives and the immediate energy of Boston circa World War I. Never opting for simplistic political parallels, Michael Lowenthal evokes empathy in unpredictable and touching ways through his crisp, charming prose. Highly accomplished, Charity Girl is a gift to all readers of quality historical and literary fiction."
— Matthew Pearl, author of The Dante Club and The Poe Shadow

"This is a deeply affecting and important novel. With Charity Girl, Michael Lowenthal at a stroke establishes himself as a significant voice in American fiction. All good historical novels mirror the past in ways that interpret the present, and this novel does just that. It's a vivid story about a shameful chapter in U.S. history, and one that has obvious implication for the current political crisis. I was thoroughly engaged by Frieda Mintz, and her life and predicament will stay with me for years to come."
— Jay Parini, author of The Last Station and The Apprentice Lover