Corn flakes aren't all Battle Creek has to offer It's tempting to athink of T. Con aghessan Boyle as the latter-day Dickens. Both write sprawling, episodic novels full of barely believable plot twists and eccentric, indelible characters. The crucial difference between the two is that while Dickens' art moves and changes you, Boyle's tickles and horrifies you. For all his reformist zeal, Dickens was essentially a romantic, concerned with the creation of myth; Boyle is a literary Terminator, bent on the destruction of myth. In Boyle's new novel The Road to Wellville, the target of his satirical wrecking ball is America's turn-of-thecenturyhealth craze, manifested in the person of the impressive and fiendish Dr. John Harvey Kellogg of Battle Creek, Mich. Egomaniacal archcapitalist, puritanical quack, fanatical vegetarian, Kellogg towers over this savagely funny novel like some American colossus, so gorged on his own rectitude that his worst abuses are committed without a twinge of doubt. Kellogg -nemesis of his cornflakeking brother Will Kellogg and Battle Creek's other breakfastfood baron, C. W. Post-presides over "the San," an opulent pseudo-hospital for wealthy dyspeptics and other pampered discontents. Here the good doctor treats his patients to a regimen that include five enemas a day, no sex and regular dining on vegetarian delicacies with such appetizing names as Protose and Nuttolene. Into this aromatic soup Boyle tosses a gullible socialite, Eleanor Lightbody, and her skeptical, randy husband Will; Charles Ossining, an apprentice huckster trying to cash in on the breakfast-cereal boom; and Kellogg's vindictive adopted son If any of the characters earns Boyle's (and our) affection, it's Oesining, whose moral slide from innocent greed (is there such a thing?) to parasitic hustling is all too easy to empathize with. His temptation is ours; so is his terror at being caught redhanded, and his elation at his miraculous rescue and subsequent transfiguration. We don't approve of him, but we know him, and he is us. Although Boyle has a reputation for being difficult, arising from his occasional postmodernist experiments, he's solidly accessible here; he's far closer in spirit to John Irving than to Thomas Pynchon. The Road to Wellville-deliciously baroque and weirdly logical in the manner of Irving's The World According to Gary-is one of the most consistently entertaining books I've read in years. I found myself giggling on nearly every page. But even as you laugh, you're aware that Boyle is never less than ravenously ambitious and deadly serious; his maniacal grin disguises a grim determination to slay all sorts of American monsters: the arrogance of the strong, the credulity of the weak, the predatorial tenacity of those who scuttle betweerl the two. By the end of the book there's blood all over Battle Creek, and plenty of it. Boyle the Terminator has struck again. And look out. He'll be back. |