Boyle treats readers to a rich comic dish in 'Road to Wellville' Whenever I express my near-fanatical admiration for T. Coraghes-san Boyle. I am liable to ship and refer to his "new album" rather than his "new novel." Such a gaffe is not too far-fetched. Given his fiction's hip style, irreverent humor and rollicking pace - to say nothing of his ear cuff, black heather jacket and albumcover pout - Boyle is surely contemporary literature's prime rock 'n' roller. Some critics claim that Boyle's work is all slick surface with no underlying substance, and indeed his short stories do tend toward fluff, like a heavy-metal band going acoustic on MTV "Unplugged." But when Boyle chooses a more complex narrative, as in his new novel, "The Road to W ellville," he displays not only the knack of a consummate story teller but also the keen eye of one who knows the human heart. Boyle is first and foremost an entertainer, on a par with Dickens or Twain. His intention is not simply to examine the human heart but to exaggerate and lampoon life and thereby to get at its bitter truth, even as his readers are convulsing in laughter. His tales are filled with vengeful ghosts, human flies, addled heiresses - all veering close to caricature, were it not for that tight knot of human weakness or passion that informs them all. Their hearts are not simply laid bare - they are grabbed and torn out hike that scene in the "Indiana Jones" film. And somehow, Boyle makes it funny. Given the topic and venue of "The Road to Wellville," my zeal may not be appreciated. For in this novel, Boyle sets his sights on folks just hike me. The year is 1907, the place is Battle Creek, Mich., where John Harvey Kellogg's Sanitarium is serving "the rich, the preposterously rich, and the merely famous" a prescriptive diet of bean tapioca, gluten mush, protose patties and prune fritters, a well as a regimen of Swedish Manual Movements, laughing exercises, vibrotherapy, sinusoidal baths and no fewer than five enemas a day. The inventor of corn flakes, peanut butter, and a caffeine-free grain beverage, as well a "some 75 other gatrically correct foods," cannot emphasize enough the benefits of the physiologic life, nor the debilitating effects of flesh foods and other modern snares. All meats and alcohol are considered poisons, tobacco is the devil's plant, and even marital relations are to be avoided at all costs. As Dr. Kellogg warns in his weekly lecture at "the San," with much finger-wagging and evangelistic hyperbole, "Excessive indulgence between the married produces as great and lasting evil effects a in the single man and woman, and is nothing more or less than legalized prostitution." There are those who hang on Dr. Kellogg's every word. However, a fine line runs between medical science and quackery, and though Kellogg walks that line with the flair of a circus acrobat, some patients in his care are not so easily taken. Will Lightbody, for instance, has followed his wife, Eleanor, to Battle Creek from posh Peterskill, New York. Will's own undiagnosed stom. ach disorder is unaffected by all the doctors regimens. As for Eleanor, while her malady remains unclear, she shows no signs of quitting all this nonsense - including a handsome doctor who seta Will's teeth on edge and a beguiling radical who promises a more exotic (and questionable) form of therapy. When Will finally takes the situation into his own hands. he supplies one of the climaxes of this novel. I say "one of the climaxes, because two other narratives are interwoven with that of the Lightbodys. One is the hapless tab of Charles Ossining, a small-time con artist who is setting himself up a President-inChief of a new breakfast cereal company but who seems to be getting swindled by a bigger-time con artist The other is the saga of Dr. Kellogg, who has troubles of his own. There's his foster son, George, for one thing, a drunkard and panhandler who seems intent on harassing his famous father to the point of violence and mayhem. Then there's also the problem of the Sanitarium itself: Despite the latest in medical technology and the healthiest of diets, Kellogg's patients, even some of his staff, are dropping dead. (Too strong an electrical current in the sinusoidal baths? Too large a dosage of radium therapy?) Thus Boyle sheds light on the origins of today's more flamboyant health practices, as well as the dynamics of the flock led by its savior. (The result, while often hilarious, is equally sobering, in light of the recent tragedy in Waco, Texas.) And let me be the first zealot to admit that Boyle does not always quite hit his mark. A few stray plot devices which seem s little threadbare, a few characters that lean further toward cartoons than even Boyle tends to go. (What of pure-hearted Nurse Graves, for instance, or even the monumentally debauched, father-hating George Kellogg?). Even Boyle's distinct style occasionally sounds almost hike a parody of Boyle, with his penchant for exclaiming "Oh, yes indeed'." when making a point; or, when characters gets overly excited, having them say the same thing three times, sometimes more: "Bender had strung him along . . bluffing, boasting, flimflamming and humbugging. Charlie was a fish. A chump. A sucker. He'd been hooked. landed. scaled. gutted, stuffed, roasted, chewed..." Such devices get a tad noticeable after awhile, the way a mosquito buzzing around the ear gets noticeable. But these are minor flaws is an otherwise first-rate comic novel. After reading "The Road to Wellville," you may not be moved to diet on protose patties, but you will certainly have done your share of laughing exercises. |