Playboy Review: The Road to Wellville The Road to Wellville (Viking) is a comic tour de force by T. Coraghessan Boyle that establishes him at the top of his literary game. In his fifth novel, Boyle takes us back to 1907-1908 to explore John Harvey Kellogg's world-famous Battle Creek Sanitarium-"bastion of right thinking, vegetarianism and self-improvement, citadel of temperance and dress reform and, not coincidentally, the single healthiest spot on the planet." As an offshoot of his health spa, Kellogg also became "the inventor of the corn flake and peanut butter, not to mention caramel-cereal coffee, Bromose, Nutolene and some 75 other gastrically correct foods." Thus, he turned Battle Creek, Michigan into the breakfast-food capital of the world. The spa and its wealthy, health-crazed devotees are ripe targets for satire, and Boyle doesn't miss a single hilarious shot, including the hucksterism of Dr. Kellogg. The doctor's lectures on the evils of red meat, refined sugar and sexual indulgence are capped with demonstrations such as trying to feed a steak to Lillian the chimpanzee or revealing that, under a microscope, aged beef has more bacteria than horse manure. Boyle focuses on Will and Eleanor Lightbody from Peterskill, New York, who come to the spa for Will's nervous stomach and Eleanor's boredom. In the parallel crackpot world of Battle Creek, small-time hustler Charlie Ossining has teamed up with big-time hustler Goodloe Bender to establish the Per-Fo: "The 'Perfect Food,' Pre-Digested, Peptonized and Celery Impregnated. Perks Up Tired Blood and Exonerates the Bowels." Charlie and Goodloe find competition tough in the cereal business, but, with the help of Dr. Kellogg's ne'er-dowell son, they progress to blackmail. In the hands of a lesser writer, this story might be a charming, mildly humorous bit of Americana. Boyle, however, has a genius for envisioning his scenes in such delicious detail and for presenting his characters with such subtle insight that The Road to Wellville is rich and delightful. |