The Girl

This novel of trenchant social realism from Le Sueur (1900–1996) packs fresh punch in this revised edition. A young woman off the farm—and known only as Girl—finds work at a speakeasy called the German Village in late 1930s downtown St. Paul, Minn. The hard-luck stories of the wretched women who congregate there form the spine of this proletarian work and offer Girl a glimmer of solace: faded beauty Belle owns the place with her husband, Hoinck, and endures his abuse out of a twisted idea of love; young prostitute Clara turns tricks on the street for a dollar until seized by sickness and insanity; and age-toughened Amelia works for the Workers Alliance (as Le Sueur did herself), distributing flyers and hoping for change. Girl watches her experienced roommate, Clara, for how to manage the brazen men in the joint, such as the sleek, dreamy, chronically unemployed Butch, and the bar's gangster protector, Ganz, who's got his predaceous eye on Girl. In her confusion of love and need, she loses her virginity to Butch, gets pregnant, and hoping to please him, signs on as the driver for their ill-starred bank robbery. Le Sueur's feminist novel, written in the '30s and first published in 1978, still strikes viscerally. (June)