I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company: A Novel of Lewis and Clark » (Reprint)

Brian Hall is the author of two previous novels and three works of nonfiction, including The Impossible Country. His journalism has appeared in Time, the New Yorker, and the New York Times Magazine.

Brian Hall's compulsively readable novel vividly re-creates Lewis and Clark's extraordinary journey into the unknown western frontier. Focusing on the emblematic moments of the participants' lives, the story unfolds through the perspectives of four competing voices—from the troubled and mercurial figure of Meriwether Lewis, the expedition leader who found that it was impossible to enter paradise without having it crumble around him, to Sacagawea, the Shoshone girl-captive and interpreter for the expedition, whose short life mirrored the disruptive times in which she lived. Bringing the day-to-day life of the expedition alive as no work of history ever could, Hall's magnificent novel fills in the gaps and provides a new perspective on the most famous journey in American history.

Douglas Brinkley

I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company -- the title is Lewis' words to Clark inviting him on the expedition -- fills in the blank pages of the Lewis and Clark journals, offering marvelous character studies of five key participants in the historical trek: Lewis, whose voice dominates the narrative; William Clark, the no-nonsense co-captain of the expedition; Sacagawea, the lovely Shoshone girl whose face now adorns the U.S. dollar coin; Toussaint Charbonneau, the French fur trader who purchased Sacagawea and made her his wife; and York, an African American slave owned by Clark.

Hall, a spellbinding prose-stylist, writes with the kind of ethereal poetic sweep found in the historical novels of Michael Ondaatje and Wallace Stegner. With consummate skill he weaves the true 1804-06 journey with a deep psychological probe of his enigmatic characters' mind-sets. To his credit, he stays as close to the historical circumstances surrounding the expedition as can be hoped for in fiction.—The Los Angeles Times