Health, Wealth & Con Games "Some people are just higher keyed than others, too sensitive and thoughtful for their own good, too intellectual, poetical, too urbane and aesthetically minded," John Harvey Kellogg explains to Will Lightbody early in T. Coraghessan Boyle's rollicking new novel, The Road to Wellville "If it weren't for my own rigorous physiologic routine and the lessons of the simple life," he adds, "I don't doubt that I myself would be a fellow sufferer." The Road to Wellville, a satire of sanitariums as comic as Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain is chilling, concerns John Havey Kellogg, the man who turned the "sanitarium business" into a worldwide, exchange in Battle Creek, and three Peterskill, N.Y., seekers after the promise of Battle Creek: Charles Ossining, who has devoted his hart and soul to the possibility of turning himself into another C. W. Post, an overnight millionaire who made his fortune in flaked cereals; and Will and Eleanor Lightbody, sick people in need of the Kellogg cure. Peterskill, N.Y., is the fictional town the author invented in his accomplished earlier PEN/Faullmer award-winning novel World's End, and in this latest work, a ribald, Dickensian tale of American life circa 1907, Boyle displays the craft and assurance of a master storyteller. The Road to Wellville is a phrase coined by Kellogg's archrival, C. W. Post, a one-time patient who stole his ideas and made millions selling health products, but it is something far more recognizable, too: The road to Wellville is the American dream of instant riches, eternal youth and the silver bullet that can solve all woes or guarantee happiness. The brilliance of Boyle's novel is that the story itself is a con. Thoroughly researched and delightfully packed with bizarre and amusing details of Kellogg's life and times, everyone in the story is either a mark or a fraud. And John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of cornflakes, "with his messianic belief in the perfectibility of the human race," turns out to be the supreme confidence man of them all. Among the more crackpot cures, diagnoses and remedies he champions are: vibrotherapy; autointoxication; sinusoidal baths (electric shock treatment for patients whose feet and hands are dipped in water); a dairy equipped with cows "vacuum leaned twice a day to prevent even the remotest possibility of a speck of dander or bovine hair winding up in the product"; radium therapy (in which the patient inhales radium vapors); yogurt-whey enemas, given to man and beast alike; milk diets, grape diets and diets of psyllium seeds and hijiki. Many of these cures prove deadly, a fact Kellogg never dwells on, since his greatest con is that no one believes in what he is doing more than John Harvey Kellogg himself. Contrasted with the bizarre, aesthetic atmosphere of Kellogg's sanitarium is the sordid town of Battle Creek that surrounds it. "The biggest little town in the world" turns out to be a hotbed of quacks and confidence men and get-rich-quick schemes; and it is here that Charles Ossining lands with dreams of selling "Per-Fo," a celery-enriched cereal that doesn't exist. Charles meets Will and Eleanor Lightbody on the train to Battle Creek, and the novel is framed by their arrival and eventual departure. As Boyle effortlessly twines their seemingly disparate tales (they hardly know or see one another), the high and low comedy of their respective misfortunes and ultimate redemptions make for entertaining and thought-provoking reading. T. Coraghessan Boyle is a brilliant imp, a trickster of the highest order, a radical hippie thumbing his nose at the world, making a mess and exposing the naked emperor. In The Road to Wellville, his rich and mind-bendingly delightful language explodes with the early 20th century's passion for invention, even as he subtly reveals the depth and tragicomedy of the failure of the American dream. |