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Summary
Summary
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's expedition to the Pacific Ocean and back in the early part of the nineteenth century is one of the most famous journeys in American history. Previous accounts have largely romanticized the expedition, treating it as a great triumph. But was it? What really went on in the minds of these brave men and those who came with them? Novelist Brian Hall has been interested in Lewis and Clark for years and became convinced that the most effective way to tell their story would be in the intimate, revelatory voice of fiction. Rather than attempt to recount the entire expedition, Hall has chosen instead to probe the psyches of its participants and to focus on some of the more emblematic moments of the journey. His narrative is shaped around and informed by an examination of the collision of white and Native American cultures at that time. To be true to this theme of colliding perspectives, he has written the novel in four voices. The primary one is that of Lewis, the troubled and mercurial figure who found that it was impossible to enter paradise without having it fall around him. The voices of the Shoshone girl Sacagawea, whose courage and resourcefulness helped ensure the expedition's completion; William Clark; and Toussaint Charbonneau, the French fur trader who took Sacagawea as his wife, add further texture to the narrative. On the eve of the two-hundredth anniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Hall has used the novelist's art to produce a compulsively readable book that fills in the gaps and provides a new perspective on this great American story.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Though it joins a crowded field of Lewis and Clark narratives, this formidable third novel by Hall (The Saskiad) is not to be dismissed. Narrated in multiple distinct voices, this retelling of the story of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's legendary expedition is less a historical blow-by-blow than an engaging character study of the two men. Hall focuses on a few significant episodes in the journey-such as the hunting accident that wounds Lewis and causes him to sink into his famous depression-as seen through the eyes of Lewis, Sacagawea, Clark and Toussaint Charbonneau, Sacagawea's French fur trader husband. The result is a memorable portrait of the expedition leaders. Lewis is melancholy but ambitious and erudite, worried that he doesn't have the literary skill to render their adventures and discoveries. The sunnier Clark has the sensibility of an artist and the courage of a soldier, but he lacks the fortitude and discipline to build on his advantages. Hall is especially interested in the encounters between Native Americans and white explorers, and he details the violent struggles with Blackfeet Indians and others. Some readers may become frustrated with Sacagawea's stream-of-consciousness narration, in which proper nouns are not capitalized ("she remembered the raids in her own time, the one near beaver's head on blue crow's camp by the blackshoes when two bears' older brother (this one's bigfather), wolf tooth, was killed along with his son, chalk"), but the lyrical and precise prose will reward those who stick with it. In any case, such distractions are minor when measured against the rest of Hall's vivid, enthralling tableau. (Jan.) Forecast: Hall's book will be competing with a spate of others commemorating the 200th anniversary of the expedition, but a 12-city author tour should help this stand-out find an audience. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Travel writer and novelist Hall (The Saskiad, 1997, etc.) expertly deploys his combined skills in a long look at the long travels of Lewis and Clark. Carefully offloading two centuries of cultural baggage, including the great weights of Thomas Jefferson and Sacajawea, Hall brings the young republic's great explorers and their co-travelers to unsettled life. Greatest attention goes to Jefferson's prickly young secretary Meriwether Lewis. Plagued by depression and by his self-centered, frequently widowed mother, Lewis would be no one's choice today to lead a vital national mission. The better-balanced, more cheerful William Clark, soldier brother to a revolutionary hero, would seem to have had the righter stuff. But it was Virginia-born Lewis who was at the president's elbow when Jefferson shelled out for a quarter of a continent. And Lewis was not your usual clerk. Fiercely intelligent, he had absorbed as much as possible from an abbreviated education, and he had exercised his abilities like a soldier. Clark was, indeed, Lewis's old army buddy, and it was that friendship that brought the frontier Louisvillian to his great adventure and national fame. Unraveling his narrative from varied viewpoints-those of the two young explorers, the teenaged Shoshone woman who accompanied them, her aging French Canadian husband/owner, and, ultimately, Clark's long-suffering slave, York-Hall draws on reams of historic documents and makes wonderfully real both the rackety, rash quality of the president's personal project and the unsettled inner lives of the explorers. Dragging a presidentially designed folding iron, swapping cheap trinkets with constantly changing Indian tribes, eating dogs, navigating by the heavens, the casual directions of the natives, and their own best guesses, journalizing in their different styles, the two captains do what should have been impossible: winning national fame and national jobs. Clark's natural buoyancy supports him to the end; Lewis's personal demons drag him to an early death. Hall takes the greatest risks with Sacajawea, realizing her thoughts in dense passages that, even so, when carefully followed, make the neolithic Shoshone world palpable. Not easy, but a serious, ambitious, complex and greatly worthwhile book. Just like the trip.
Booklist Review
Hall, the author of two previous novels and three works of nonfiction, has delivered a gorgeous historical novel about achievement and angst. Nearly 200 years have passed since Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set off on their expedition to the furthest reaches of the continent, and much ink has been spilled in the name of lionizing these two very different men. Hall's approach is different; while he clearly believes Lewis and Clark--as well as their Shoshone Indian guide Sacagawea--are important historical figures, he also views each as a complex and fascinating individual. Hall presents Lewis, the novel's main character, as a man prone to epic emotional highs and lows of equal magnitude. His journey with Clark was the accomplishment of a lifetime, and Lewis' attempts to deal with the journey's punishing realities are sharply drawn. From its beautifully written prologue to its understated conclusion, Hall's novel is big-hearted and satisfying. Not unlike Cormac McCarthy in his evocative descriptions of the landscape of a young nation, Hall is a versatile writer, and this is a wonderful book. --Kevin Canfield
Library Journal Review
Hall starred in the Time cover story on Lewis and Clark, whose famed expedition celebrates its bicentennial in January. Here, the author of The Saskiad uses intimate portraiture to reconstruct the journey. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
