Malcom Jones Jr.
Newsweek 4/19/93

Part zealot, part rogue, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg is a satirical novelist's dream. The inventor of cornflakes, Kellogg was a pious health nut whose true genius was in making people miserable in the name of nutrition. For the first three decades of this century, he ran the country's most famous health spa at Battle Creek, Mich., "the town of vegetable legend," where everyone from Henry Ford to Johnny Weissmuller took the cure. Mixing quackery and legitimate medicine Kellogg preached the virtues of vibrotherapy, frequent enemas and a diet of bran and fruit augmented by such Kellogg specialties as Nuttolene giblets and Protose fillets.

A funny, thoughtful, immaculately written novel, "The Road to Wellville" eviscerates the gullible pilgrims and conniving hucksters who rubbed shoulders in turn-ofthe-century Battle Creek. Looming over all is the complicated figure of Kellogg himself. As author T. Coraghessan Boyle portrays him, Kellogg was deaf to criticism and unfazed by the casual cruelty of his cures, a monster drunk on his own omnipotence. "I live right and think right every minute of the day," he blithely asserts. But is this Kellogg as he was or as Boyle wants him to be? Boyle is infamous for mixing fact with his own fancies. But in this, his fifth and most accessible novel, it hardly matters. He is riffing on biographical fact to nail down one of the most influential, albeit unattractive, archetypes of our history: the puritanical, proselytizing crank Kellogg's harebrained remedies are no more than the antecedents of today's high colonics and cholesterol counts. If we are what we eat, then it was the likes of Kellogg who helped make us what we are today.