Fun With the Flakes In the Cereal City of 1907 Health is about as controversial as peace or motherhood. It's part of that great triumvirate of wishes-health, wealth and happiness-that earns toasts in every language. But cross an enthusiasm for healthy well-being with cockeyed philosophy, dubious science and puritanical zeal, and you've got fanaticism, something both self-righteous and ferocious, a beast that would a soon smite steak-eaters as persuade them of the virtues of vegetarianism. "The Road to Wellville," T. Coraghessan Boyle's wonderfully droll, seamlessly crafted new novel, reaches ac into history to make telling points about today's health and food faddists, or those of any day. Set in 1907 at Dr. John Harvey Kellogg's "Temple of Health" in Battle Creek, Mich., the city famous for making breakfast synonymous with cereal, the book is a rollicking. high-spirited comedy that never neglects its subject's darker corners. Yet, Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain," which comes immediately to mind, is altogether too dark and brooding to serve as predecessor. Boyle doesn't permit his characters to discuss philosophy, nor does he subscribe to the view that life is merely a process of decay. No, "The Road to Wellville" draws its ancestry from the bounteous, bustling, hyper-vivid novels of Charles Dickens, John Irving and T. Coraghessan Boyle himself, especially his "World's End" and "East is East." Boyle portrays Kellog, the real-life inventor of corn flakes, as equal parts healer, entrepreneur and flamboyant showman. Like his chief rival, C. W. Post, Kellogg has made millions from the breakfaet food business. The grand monument to his faith, attracting the well-to-do from all over the country, is a "luxury hotel, hospital and spa all rolled into one." Here patients eat vegetarian meals, exercise and shun alcohol and caffeine. They are subjected to frequent enemas, Swedish manual movement, "vibrothsapy" and "sinusoidal baths." Even among married couples, sex is forbidden. To this palace of self-denial, Boyle brings Will and Eleanor Lightbody-he for treatment of insomnia and severe gastrointestinal problems, she for a vague female malaise. While true-believer Eleanor flourishes under Kelogg's ministrations, her husband grows sicker and increasingly skeptical of the entire enterprise. Banned from sleeping with each other, they turn elsewhere for consolation. Eleanor is drawn to a Kellogg associate and then to one Dr. Spitzvogel and his "womb manipulation"-an erotic delight she has not previously experienced. A humiliated Will longs for his nurse's embrace. An arrival on the same train from Peterskill, N.Y., (the setting for "World's End") is Charlie Ossining, a young man from the servantvent class desperate to emulate his idol, C. W. Post. He's in town to join forces with Goodloe Bender, an older business partner whom we quickly recognize as a smooth-talking con artist. Charlie comes bearing a substantial check from his Peterskill benefactor, Amelia Hookstratten, for investment in the breakfast-food company that he and Bender are supposedly starting. They are soon joined by George Kellogg, the good doctor's adopted son, who is too much of a drunken ne'er-do-well to lend the enterprise anything more than his surname. George is his father's antithesis and destined to become his nemesis. Boyle creates these and other characters with great Dickensian glee. A champion of vegetarianism and nudism appears before us a "a man of unintegrated parts, the head too big for the shoulders, hands like flippers, the nose barely there and the teeth everywhere." A hack driver looks "wizened, white-haired, short as a man sawed in half, with a glob of a now and two hard cynical eyes that shone like penny candy." Cynicism does indeed light up Boyle's story. But so does the dim bulb of good inten-tions. Bender has no illusions about his thievery; Charlie, having been duped, overcomes early scruples and devotes a lucrative career to the fakery of patent medicines. Kellogg's crime is believing he has a monopoly on the road to wellness. As Will coma to realize-after months of enemas, an all-yogurt diet and worse-the doctor's pseudoscientific therapies reduce his patients to abject dependency. As for Eleanor, she senses that the sexual pleasure Kellogg forbids should be at the heart of the good life. The pursuit of health and wealth - what could be more in the American grain? And more riddled with hilarious ironies and contradictions? Even in the small touches, Boyle keeps us grinning. Upton Sinclair, author of the classic meat-packing expose, "The Jungle", for instance, turns up briefly as a patient of the quackiah Dr. Kellogg. Boyle refuses to be a dutiful follower of the upbeat American (and Kelloggian) line that wellness is the rule and illness the aberration. Rather, he has fun with the idea, playing with its facile optimism and exposing the mountsbanks and hucksters who hover at the fringes of this or any social movement. Poor Will and Eleanor! Subjected to endless enemas, mudbaths, gluten mash, Graham grits and a tea that tastes like "something you might use on the woodshed to discourage dry rot." Rarely has so much suffering produced so much fun. Enjoy. |