Brian Hall

The history of the 1804 Lewis and Clark expedition, which first revealed much of the interior of the continent to white Americans, has been covered quite thoroughly in recent years by both Ken Burns and Stephen Ambrose. Brian Hall takes a slightly different approach to the material in I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company with an intriguing blend of fiction and research-based history. The idea is to weave a more complete story than nonfiction allows by filling in gaps in the historical record with careful invention and educated guesses, and shifting perspective Rashomon-style between the four main people involved—the melancholic but brilliant Meriwether Lewis; his Boswell, William Clark; teenage Indian guide Sacagawea; and her French fur-trader husband. Hall’s prose experiments in the Sacagawea sections, intended to better represent her cultural way of thinking and language, are well-intentioned but not always successful. At times they are as opaque as the densest word-thickets of James Joyce. But on the whole this is the best of both worlds: Hall has a born novelist’s sense of character and a historian’s eye for the compelling fact.