Laughing from the stomach up Put down whatever else you are reading and pick up "The Road to Wellville." It has been quite a while since I've read anything so consistently funny as this novel, and though the humor is laced with gall it is also obstinately and implacably hilarious. "The Road to Wellville" is a comedy of American history, set in Battle Creek, Michigan in 1907-08, at a time when new millionaires are being minted like coins and the coins are made of gold. Teddy Roosevelt is president and ambition is the watchword. Capitalism is on the loose; it is taking the Philippines from mori-bund Spain; it is charging up San Juan Hill with its Rough Riders; it is filling the land with automobiles and steam engines and electricity and slogans. It is raising cattle on the range and devouring beef in the home. It is inventing cures for known ailments and inventing ailments to keep pace with the cures. Rising and falling are the small talk of bankers and bootblacks, and at the train station you can buy stock as easily as you can buy a sandwich. The prophet of profit is P.T. Barnum, who gleefully tells the suckers that one of them is bom every minute. Does this sound familiar? Where were you in the 1980s? At the heart of T. Coraghessan Boyle's version of this old story is Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of-the cornflake and peanut butter and foods named frutose, granose, maltose and nuttolene. He is said to have invented the electric blanket, that boon to single living and scourge of midwinter cuddling. Brother of William K. Kellogg, who actually ran the cereal business, Dr. Kellogg spread the gospel of health through diet and operated Battle Creek's renowned Sanitarium, where the rich and famous from Europe and America came to be indoctrinated in the "physiologic rite." Kellogg taught that Americans were "autointoxicated" through atlcohol, tobacco and stimulants, through sexual contact and especially through the consumption of meat, a substance no less polluting to "the temple of the human body" than cyanide. He put his charges on cleansing regimes: milk and grape diets, seaweed (for its brushy consistency, to scour out the colon), bean tapioca pudding and prune fritters, nut steak and creamed gluten gravy. He gave them sinusoidal baths, pulsing low-level electrical currents through their arms and legs; he prescribed radium breathing and "kinkectomies" to relieve colonic crimps; he believed in yogurt-whey enemas. He was the grand theorist of bowel cleansing and "administered more enemas than any man in history." this churning food processor Boyle tosses Charlie Ossining and Will and Eleanor Lightbody, innocents from the East have come to Grand Rapids for the reasons that pilgrims come: Ossinin to make a killing; the Lightbodies to take the cure. Ossining has been lured to Battle Creek by one Goodloe Bender, his business partner in Per Fo, Perfect Food, a celery-impregnated breakfast food ("perks up tired blood and exonerates the bowels") for which they are soliciting investments. Charlie can smell money on people "the way a weasel smells out a ben" and is carrying a sizable check from his "Aunt" Amelia Hookastratten of Peterskill. Eleanor Lightbody is one of the San's (Sanitarium's) devoted regulars and is on her third trip, the first with her reluctant husband, a convalescent alcoholic and opium addict (from a concoction called White Star Liquor Cure) whose stomach has gone bad on him. We know, even as they meet each other on the train to "the Biggest Little City in the U.S.A.," that Charlie Ossining and the Lightbodies are marks. In fact, Will Lightbody is going to leave several feet of colon. behind in tribute to the physiologic lift and will almost lose his wife to one Dr. Spitzvogel and "Die Handhabung Therapeutik," a laying-on of hands that you are welcome to imagine for yourself. Charlie Ossining is going to leave behind Auntie Amelia's check and a lot more, as tuition for his education in the rules of commerce. But not before he leams the lesson that Goodloe Bender has taught him. which he might have learned with less trauma from W.C. Fields: "Never give a sucker an even break." Most of the book concerns the trials of Charlie Ossining and the Lightbodies, but at the center of everything is the magnetic figure of George Kellogg. Impresario and showman, guru of the natural and evangelist of the simple, he holds center stage in the book, as he did in life, with his brilliant inventiveness, his rapid-fire lectures, his show-and-tell performances. He brings onto stage Lillian, an evil-tempered chimpanzee whom he had acquired from a circus, and offers her a choice between the steak and a banana. (Talk about a setup!) Hell bring a 20-foot-long tapeworm on stage, to illustrate the horrors of pork, or the San's pet wolf, Fauna, who has been raised a vegetarian and has lost not only the taste for meat but all aggressive instincts. It's hard to know the flimflam from the science, so embedded are both in Kellogg's florid personality and his instinct for the theatrical. Kinkectomies, these days, are as fashionable as breathing radium. On the other hand, the sinusoidal bath, though, it runs amok and zaps a patient in this book, has had a recent revival among sports therapists; vegetarianiam has never been more in vogue, and sexual abstinence in making a comeback. And Fletcherism-chewing until it hurts-seems to have become a staple of sound dietary practice. It is all very funny, but "The Road to Wellville" is a comedy of humiliation throughout, and laughter brings unease in its train. Everyone is brought low or unmasked or dealt a blow, precisely at the spot of greatest vulnerability. Even Dr. Kellogg has a weakness, George, one of his 42 adopted children who alone among them has turned against him. (A believer in sexual abstinence, Kellogg has no natural children with his wife, Ella.) There is something cruel about this book; after the first 25 enemas, you may think that the author's sense of humor contains a tincture of nastiness. The word is that Alan Parker ("The Commitments," "Angel Heart," "Misisippi Burning") has already signed on to adapt and direct the film. It may be a while however, and the novel has a rich verbal vitality that you should savor for yourself. |