BOOK REVIEW: Becky Thatcher

"BECKY: The Life And Loves Of Becky Thatcher -- A Novel," by Lenore Hart (St. Martin's Press, $24.95, 372 pp.)

Aren't we against human cloning in the United States?

So why do we now have "Becky: The Life and Loves of Becky Thatcher"? It's yet another novel that plucks a few cells from someone else's literary creation and cultivates them in another writer's petri dish until they grow into the same character " in a whole 'nother novel.

We've gotten used to it by now: "Scarlett," the authorized sequel to "Gone With the Wind," sold hugely well " including one copy to me. Huck Finn's father, Lolita, Mrs. Captain Ahab, Elphaba and Glinda " all back-storied. The first book I think I ever bought with my own money was a seminal-lit spinoff, "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead," and nobody ever accused Tom Stoppard of a want of imagination for animating Will Shakespeare's characters as his own.

I understand the letdown, turning the last page on beloved characters and thinking, that's it? I felt that longing with Sherlock Holmes and with Tom Sawyer, among others " but not with Tom's nominal girlfriend, Becky, that simpering, quivering blond-haired human blancmange who, in Mark Twain's hands, is more plot device than real person.

American boys all wanted to be like Tom or Huck, but who wanted to be like Becky? Certainly not me.

In "Becky," Lenore Hart tries to change my mind " and in many ways succeeds " by changing Twain's Becky into her own woman. "Becky" is autobiographical, written 60-odd years after the events of Twain's novel, in 1910 San Francisco. Becky means to reclaim her reputation: She never really was Twain's simpering girlie-girl, but a clear-eyed realist, holding her own with Tom and Huck.

She was a bold, fierce tomboy unafraid of knives or tree-climbing or ghosts or Indians " or of kissing first (her ardor for Tom is a major plot device here). There is so much in this book about Huck being resentful of Becky and wanting Tom all to himself that somewhere around Page 60, I said " out loud, on a crowded airplane " "Is Huck Finn gay?"

Becky's husband, Sid, Tom's cousin, wasn't the sniveling Fauntleroy that Twain made him out to be, either. Heck, his engagement present to Becky was a copy of the early feminist book "A Vindication of the Rights of Women." Sid's uncharacteristic departure for the front in the last days of the Civil War stirs the plot pot, as the old gang is back together again " Becky, Sid, Tom and Huck. Becky, married and a mother; Tom, a riverboat pilot; Sid, a lawyer; and Huck off being his rapscallion self.

Early on, Becky writes, "My name isn't important. Call me Becky Thatcher." But the name is more than important; it is imperative. Without it, and without the other Twain characters as threads to reweave into an alternative future, "Becky" would be just another historical novel.

Whether you resent the kidnapping of Twain characters to carry forward a story that is not Twain's own, I understand perfectly why Hart did it, which is what made the book likable on several levels.

Why had Twain been quick to give Becky the brushoff? Because he couldn't imagine her being interesting? What did women think and feel then? Did they yearn to read something other than cookbooks and ride astride? Did they want to make a living? Did they feel stifled and bored by the narrow roles thrust upon them?

Becky here writes resentfully and impatiently about women being "home waiting with the other women, with the children, hobbled by yards of skirts and petticoats" while momentous things were afoot.

Women so rarely see themselves written up empathetically or realistically in history or in classic literature that, in liberating Becky, Hart liberates our longing to cut loose historical women, to let them out of their corsets and farthingales, to bob their hair and hand them a pistol instead of a skillet and see what they'll do.

Women's adult lives were so confining that Hart,like Margaret Mitchell with Scarlett, needed the Civil War to emancipate Becky, to make her cross paths with Twain's characters again. (Twain himself emerges as a preening hustler, and Becky has her own revenge on Sammy Clemens for making her out to be such a wuss.)

With "Becky," we may not like the results; Becky Unleashed becomes a kind of she-Zelig. The westward course of the novel gives us Becky Thatcher and Jesse James; Becky Thatcher and the Union Army; Becky Thatcher and the Nevada Silver Rush; Becky Thatcher, Newspaperwoman; Becky Thatcher and Custer's Last Stand; Becky Thatcher, Suffragist.

But there's more flesh on her than Twain ever bothered to put on. If you can forgive Hart her character larceny and appreciate how "Becky" pushes the envelope of "what-if" for making 19th-century women more real and accessible, then there's something to be said for "Becky" as a book.

Even Twain would have agreed: Such a life beats slaving over a hot oven " wood-burning or microwave.