'Road to Wellville' suberb work of a master plotter Three things you'll learn after reading T. Coraghessan Boyle's "The Road To Wellville": 1. Cold cereal, about the most pedestrian foodstuff you can imagine, was developed by nutrition freaks in the early 1900s and received with suspicion; 2. John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of the toasted corn flake (also of peanut butter and the electric blanket), administered enema treatments to such congested luminaries as Johnny Weissmuller, President Taft and Thomas Edison; 3. T. C. Boyle maybe the most entertaining writer in America. Boyle has been toiling for 20 years to give plot back its good name. His three collections present beautifully structured stories of needle-eyed hypochondriacs and fanatical entrepreneurs, suggesting a mix of P. T. Barnum and Franz Kafka. His four novels (especially "World's End" and "East is East") treat of absent fathers and deranging hungers, and each is as tightly storyboarded as a spy movie. Likewise, "The Road To Wellville" is a superbly plotted entertainment (the director Alan Parker is to begin shooting its movie version this fall, though how he will simulate Boyle's singular ability to treat the unmentionable is anyone's guess). Set in the "stupefying" winter of 1907, it concentrates almost exclusively on Dr. John Harvey Kellogg's Battle Creek Sanitarium. The good doctor has fixated on the clenched bowel as the source of ill health; "what he discovered [was] that apes moved their bowels almost continuously. Simple. Natural. The way it was meant to be." Man didn't. "He had civilized his bowel, housetrained it, as it were." So Kellogg's course of therapy in eincludes five-a-day enemas as well as an absolute prohibition on "flesh foods," caffeine and sexual relations ("even a single discharge of seminal fluids could be fatal"). He is the sort of dangerously selfconfident target Boyle loves to satirize. His "San" is a gathering place for "milksipping" and more or less hardy millionaires; "The patients tended to be of a certain class, and they really had no interest in sitting across the dining fable from the plebeian or those who had the bad grace to be truly and dangerously ill." Into this ripe situation come Charlie Ossining and the Lightbodys. Eleanor Lightbody is a "Battle Freak": a confirmed, hard-eyed follower of Dr. Kellogg. Her husband, Will, has an undiagnosed ulcer and is accompanying his wife in hopes of preserving their fragile marriage. Charlie, age 26 (his business card proudly reads "President-In-Chief'), has come to Battle Creek to make his fortune in breakfast cereals, with a $6,000 stake from his Aunt Amelia. Scoffing Will is the clear-eyed vehicle through which we perceive the San, and Boyle has great fun with turn-of-the-century medical thinking. Will spends six weeks on the milk diet, endures vibrotherapy, laughter therapy, electric baths (often lethal) and "the hot glove." Eleanor takes the fasting and nudism cures. She tries "die handhabung therapeutik" (manipulation therapy) and though "he just loved the look on her face when she got back from her treatment," Will grows uneasy. When he learns it involves "manipulation of the womb" (and that antisex Eleanor has "never felt better in my life"), he goes over the edge. Charlie suffers equal indignities at the hands of his partner, Goodloe Bender ("Good Law Bender"; Boyle always has a soft spot for the unabashed con man). Bender stows Charlie in a freezing boarding house and then absconds with their money, leaving him to face starvation and scandal. Then Charlie's aunt (a society friend of the Lightbodys) arrives to take the cure, learns that Charlie has lost her investment, and the humiliating arrest scene that follows is among the most excruciating in all of Boyle's work. And of course, all is not well with the good doctor. The adoptive father of 42, he has blithely employed his children as servants and product-tasters. Son George (one of Boyle's resentful slouchers) has revisited Battle Creek to make his dissatisfactions felt, and Dr. Kellogg waifs anxiously as his pranks turn more and more vicious. Boyle reels off these three stories at the same time, relying on breathless crosscut, intertwining coincidence and shameless cliffhangers. Often the cliffhangers come to nothing; Boyle just wants to keep us reading, and will drag his characters through any humiliation - impotence, social disaster, scrounging - to make us smile. He loves not his characters but his reader. Boyle is ruthlessly entertaining. With his swelled cast and swirling canvas, Boyle is going to be compared to a lot of 19th-century novelists before this reviewing season is out, yet some of his stylistic tics are pure 20th-century. He is comfortable with Automatic English - formula metaphor and the cozy verb. Characters "study" and "scan" each other 18 times in this novel; they long seven times to "do something, anything," and are "dumbstuck" and "thunderstruck" on four occasions. Boyle's second tic is a kind of thesaurus approach. Rather than trying to find the precise word, he throws out three or four, assuming one of them will stick: "It was time to vanish. Poof. Skip town;" "'Oh, Doctor, Doctor,' she cried, and it was a chant, a prayer, a hosanna" It's not as if Boyle can't write beautifully. He describes Will Lightbody, slimmed down by 20 pounds, as "all prancing shank and flapping elbow ... an animated coat rack." Perhaps, when this book gives him the success he's been after, Boyle will relax and turn his attention to a novel where his prose will be the equal of his powerful storytelling. In the last chapter, when Dr. Kellogg and George meet for the father-son showdown Boyle's fiction has been building to for 10 years, Charlie escapes the police, and Will Lightbody, having caught Eleanor in nudist therapy and die handkabung thempeutik simultaneously, reasserts his husbandly authority in a scene that may make feminists bluster and reasonably educated psychology students grin, you realize you're in the hands of an entertainer at the top of his game. "The Road to Wellville" may be the most fun book of the season. |