I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company: A Novel of Lewis and Clark

I was disappointed that the only "new" part to this story was an attempt to have us see what was happening occasionally from the point of view of the Indian woman who accompanied the corp. Unfortunately it was almost impossible to read. You didn't know who was talking or thinking what. The language was so garbled I found myself skipping over big sections. For a better read try the actual Journal of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Didn’t like book service excellent!

I tend to like very straight prose, Tolstoy , Bellow, etc. and my tendency is not to like or be open much to avant garde fiction which I would certainly consider this to exemplify. I think this book is a masterpiece. I really don't enjoy writing reviews so will just say to those who are EXPERIENCED ,deep readers and who may like a W.-themed book to please give this book a chance. The book is flawed but I am giving 5 stars to offset all the reviews by the Harry Potter and Sherman Alexie crowd here (Much like Faulkner or even Melville, this is not EASY reading that you can do when you are half asleep or sitting on a noisy bus). This is beautiful ART. Read this!!MattPS--Wishing Brian Hall had attempted this book Waterborne which i recently opened and then closed quickly (Rubbish, mas o menos). Hall's prose is lavish and evocative without being contrived or showy. You will not find an abundance of similes here.

If you like Lewis and Clark- this is the book for you!!! small print but worth the read!

a gift

I've had this book on my shelf for about 10 years, and I'm SO happy I finally got around to reading it. It's less about the voyage, and more about trying to enter into the consciousness of the various members of the expedition. The Indian sections (as well as Charbonneau's) ARE extremely difficult, as so many have pointed out, and I, too, nearly gave up at one point. But I'm so glad I persisted, because the book is SO excellent in so many ways. It really makes the characters come alive -- particularly Merriwether Lewis -- and in such a way I don't think I'll ever forget it. Indeed, there's a scene with Lewis one night in the middle of the plains that's an absolutely awe-inspiring bit of imagining, and I feel he's onto something with sensing an attraction from Lewis towards Clark. Even the title is extraordinarily good: I take it to refer to Lewis, thinking he should be happy, but ultimately not winding up being so. This is a very demanding work, and it DOES help to know a little bit about the various figures beforehand. But it really rewards patience, and I think ultimately is a truly great work of art. I loved it.

Amazon should be ashamed to have this book on the same page as Undaunted Courage. While this book is somewhat true to the history of Lewis and Clark, The author (He who shall not be named) has created a filthy distusting bunch of words that make very little sense. My stomach was turned by this book on more than one occasion. The graphic detail was not needed in context.If you must read this book, wait to find it in my recycle bin.

Earlier reviewers have summed up why this book gets such disparate five- and one-star ratings. My three stars weigh its merits and its shortcomings equally. Let me explain. I picked this up knowing nothing about the subject. Brian Hall has labored to flesh out (and as with any honest book about a frontier, savagery, and harsh, raw, primitive survival, there is flesh and blood in many senses) their inner lives. He explains in his afterword that he filled in the gaps of the historical record of L&C, and came up with fictional but possible situations that would explain what is factually known about the expedition.Anyone who critiques this book (pro, con, or mixed) needs to read it all the way through. Be fair to the author! Any reader must after reading it then study the carefully worded explanation by Hall of his methods, research, and intentions in spending four years writing this novel. Hall deserves to be taken seriously for his ambitious undertaking. He breathes life what for most of us are two names & an ampersand, and a polysyllabically named woman on a dollar cone. Hall delves into musty tomes and yellowing charts and half-recalled tribal names. Through the interpretations and changes that L&C bring and complicate, names change, loyalties shift, and even the languages nearly die out in Charbonneau's case quicker than he as their interpreters. This emerges in the multi-voiced narrative he builds up from four main points-of-view.He takes a time when what words mean and who translates, alters, or creates them demonstrate power over the Other. Control is conveyed in what you call or name someone. And these words can be brutal, demeaning, funny, or profound. Hall dares to make his figures human in all their messy longings, their mental ramblings, and in their bodies, graphic as the language may be.Chaucer used the words repeated here, as did Shakespeare and Joyce (his influence is also evident in some of Lewis' later self-questioning). Graphic or at least ruder terms for sex exist in probably any language. Many people two hundred years ago may not have spoken (or at least written!) the blunt words that repulse some reviewers today, but they may have thought them, or euphemized their intended impact. For the protagonists, the root of their existence is grounded in the material, the raw, the uncooked -- not in culture, goods, or ideas. Lewis, Clark, Charbonneau even, and Sacagawea in her own elusive manner all respond to the land and its bounty and its horrors.Hall also admits that, of course, with Charbonneau and Sacagawea (and I suppose York, but I leave that to experts) he had far less to go on. Hall's ability to enter into these respectively non-"white," or "French Canadian-gone native" streams of consciousness is impressive, but not fully convincing. It's partially because (and I seem to be in a minority of reviewers here) C & S (not to mention York's but one narration) earned by Hall's dexterity many more chances than he gives them to "speak." Lewis grows tedious and dulls as the book continues, and the pace slows in the last third considerably. The final 150 pages are seen to be necessary "overall" in the story's arc, but the climactic scene -- that seems to be the arrival at the Continental Divide, or the journey to the Pacific, is muffled considerably. This mutes the message. The impact of the attainment of their goal is an echo when it should have been a roar.As one early reviewer below noted, the band is in the Rockies and then ten pages later seems to be at the Pacific. It's over that fast, and the retrospective way the post-Rockies scenes are conveyed drains the energy out of them. (This same sudden lurch happened in Hall's Balkan travelogue, "Stealing From a Dead Place," and on my Amazon review of that book I commented on this unsteady quality.) I sensed that Hall might have half-secretly wearied after so much verbal effort in the middle third detailing the long trek along the Missouri River. Perhaps inadvertently, the exhaustion that Lewis suffers post-climax at the mountain source of the Missouri vitiates practically the rest of the narrative, and that severely unbalances its structure.This novel, which I also found very slow going over ten days, was not perfect. It lagged, it lumbered, and after a while one becomes weary of moping Lewis and longs for more of Charbonneau's acerbity or Sacagawea's unfamiliarity, so vivid are both characters expressed evocatively. The central figures, Lewis, as does Clark, becomes less intriguing as the novel goes on. Maybe this was Hall's intent and/or historical veracity yet it dulls the impact of their tale.I do like the attempt to show the "afterlife" once one achieves celebrity young and has to live long beyond it, but the novel needed more intrinsic interest to sustain this stage of the narrative. Flawed, but learned and intricately crafted. It shows its idiosyncracies, but in the tone that Charbonneau and Sacagawea energize if so differently from each other, Hall shows his talent. All in all, this book demands close attention. It does not move quickly. But, if you are willing, it may to you too prove admirable for its vivid audacity L&C may recede after you read their tales, while both C & S have superbly described reactions in their very distinctive and nearly utterly polarized "inner voices" that narrate their intriguing stories as "supporting roles" to the main figures, who pale (!) by comparison.