A matter of fact

From Leo Tolstoy to contemporary British novelist Pat Barker, writers of historical fiction have wrestled with the problem. How do you make the facts serve your story, rather than the other way around? How do you respect the history you're using without letting it take charge?

Boston novelist Michael Lowenthal faced the question with his new book, "Charity Girl." He stumbled on its little-known background and knew he wanted to spread the word. Only gradually did he realize that it had to be a novel, and that he couldn't let his attention to historic facts overwhelm his art.

"I'm waiting to see what people think," he said during an interview at his Roslindale home, "whether I went past that line." Complicating matters further, even his publisher is making as much of the history as of the fiction. " 'Charity Girl' examines a dark period in our history," the jacket copy begins, "when fear and patriotic fervor led to devastating consequences."

The facts are that during World War I the US government arrested 30,000 young women suspected of having venereal disease and locked at least 15,000 of them in detention centers, without recourse to courts, as part of a campaign to protect the armed forces from disease. Some were arrested just for wearing "provocative" clothing or being near troops. Though not unknown to historians, it appears that no books have been written about the program , and none of the women ever told their stories in public.

Author of two contemporary novels, Lowenthal was researching a freelance travel article in 2001 when he came across Susan Sontag's book "AIDS and Its Metaphors," which he had always wanted to read. "Flipping through this book," he said, "I saw a sentence about a proposal to quarantine people with AIDS, which she compared to the detention of girls who had venereal disease in World War I. I was thunderstruck. I had never heard of this." He asked others who had studied history, and they had the same reaction.

"It was like this little secret that I had stumbled upon," Lowenthal said.

Fired with curiosity, he dived into the subject, and eventually found journal articles, and chapters within books, that dealt with the program, but no separate book. He hunted for specific detainees, to read their stories, "but couldn't find one. I might find a reference to a girl with the first name and last initial, but all the writing I could find was by government officials."

In a sense, it was his own book that was eluding him. "I kept thinking, 'Where am I going with this? What am I looking for?' " said Lowenthal, who is 37. "At first I thought I should try this as a historical work, but I'm not trained as a historian. Then there was one of those daydreaming moments when I started to imagine a girl. Rather than trying to find a real one, I began to create one, and in that strange novelist's way, the girl I imagined became more real to me than those I had been reading about."

The girl is Frieda Mintz, 17 and Jewish, from Boston's West End. She moves out of her widowed mother's house to escape a coerced marriage, takes a room in a boarding house and a job wrapping packages at Jordan Marsh, the department store. Naive, lonely, and passionate, she is infected by a soldier and abruptly finds herself fired from her job, then locked up in a Fitchburg detention center by the Committee on Prevention of Social Evils Surrounding Military Camps.

Besides her detention, the novel concerns Frieda's loneliness and striving for love and rescue, the characters of the other very different girls locked up with her, and the forces of hypocrisy, ignorance, and coldness that can crush a young person in a jam she barely understands. The novel is packed with historical detail (including the flu pandemic and the 1918 World Series at Fenway Park).

One theme is timeless -- the poses people take in times of national crisis. "Don't we all," said Lowenthal, "especially in a period like that, or like now, put on a show? Everybody has a sense, during wartime, that your neighbors are watching you to see what bumper sticker you have on your car, or whether you're flying the flag. It's all about putting on a show." There is also the parallel of people locked up without benefit of habeas corpus.

Lowenthal, who lives with his boyfriend, writer Scott Heim, grew up near Washington, graduated from Dartmouth College in 1990, and moved to Boston, which he loves, in 1994. In addition to the novels "The Same Embrace" (1998) and "Avoidance" (2002), he has made a living with magazine writing and teaching at Lesley University and Boston College.

For "Charity Girl," he had to keep the library work under control (he allowed himself exactly 365 days of research before starting to write), lest his book become a clever fictional vehicle for a historical narrative. He had to stay focused on Frieda.

"I know that when I am reading," he said, "my hackles go up when I feel that the author is showing off a gem that he unearthed in the library. For me, it breaks the fictional dream, and I see the puppetmaster pulling the strings. Someone said, when I was starting, the best advice is to do as much research as you can and then forget all about it."

But the publisher didn't forget. "This is an editor's dream," said senior editor Heidi Pitlor, who handled the book for Houghton Mifflin, "fiction with a nonfiction hook in the hands of a deft artistic writer, this virtually untold story told through wonderfully clear eyes. The combination of his gifts and the story itself is rare in fiction these days."

One question is whether the writer will get critical credit for writing fiction, when the publisher puts so much emphasis on the historic background. The publicity literature begins, above the title and author's name, with a line in all capitals: "BASED ON A SHAMEFUL FACT FROM AMERICA'S PAST."

Lowenthal said, "Yes, I think people are going to focus on the historic basis, and there is a part of me that is disappointed, because for me so much of writing is about the sound of sentences. A friend of mine, a wonderful writer, says the whole point is to write sentences. Of course, I am sort of proselytizing this topic. I want people to know about it. [The book has a note on further reading.] I am making my peace with the idea that if the historical basis gets people interested, they will read the sentences, too."

David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.