Snap, Crackle, Pop In Battle Creek Throughout his career, T. Coraghessan Boyle has shown a special affinity for dirt and a special relish for depicting the feckless self-absorption of the postwar generation. In his early story "Bloodfall." seven commune dwellers who wear only white are subjected to a rain of blood, then feces, but their response is to nestle more closely together and go back to sleep. In his last novel, "East Is East." the members of the Jeffcoat family, as replete with naivete as they are with all the most modern camping conveniences, set out for a week in the Okefenokee Swamp and never begin to comprehend the perils they escape In these works-and many of those in between-Mr. Boyle has excelled at holding up a mirror in which our own faces grin foolishly against the very dark background of a world we don't comprehend, and don't even try to comprehend. The experience of reading Mr. Boyle is thus an uncomfortable one. His precise and often delicious comic stvle and his exuberant wordplay promise pleasure, vet the justly deserved fates of his narcissistic and sometimes cruel characters withhold a final portion of pleasurable satisfaction. His works are easy to savor but hard to embrace: thev have. I think. aroused much admiration, but not so much love. In his new novel, "The Road to Wellville." Mr. Boyle seems to have abjured baby boomers - and, for a little while, dirt. The subject, indeed, is health. It is 1907 and the reader is invited to contemplate :he inventor of cornflakes. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg of Battle Creek. Mich.. a paragon of clean living who prescribes for the patients in his sanitarium not one but five enemas every single day, as well as a diet featuring nut butter, grapes, milk, a mysterious substance called Protose and a drink called kumyss (which, according to one reluctant diner, "smelled like a wet dog"). The patients at the Battle Creek Sanitarium (known to devotees simply as the San) include the usual gaggle of the wealthy and influential: "On the horizon were visits by Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, Thomas Edison, Admiral Richard E. Byrd and the voluminous William Howard Taft." It does not escape the doctor that his fortune and power owe much to their faith in him. But Dr. Kellogg is a man of convictions, too, and part of Mr. Boyle's purpose is to explore the workings of such deeply held beliefs. Every religion needs a skeptic, and for the religion of "biologic living," the author provides Will Lightbody, a wealthy young man from Peterskill, N.Y., who follows his wife, Eleanor, to Battle Creek, partly to protect his marriage and partly to seek relief from his own affliction, a gut that sings with pain every time he takes a bite. Will is a victim of earlier misguided home medication: in an attempt to wean him from drink, Eleanor has been surreptitiously dosing him with Sears' White Star Liquor Cure, which turns out to be tincture of opium. To break himself of his narcotic habit, he goes back to Old Crow. By the time he arrives at the San, Will is "just one more sick man in a wheelchair," watching his wife flirt with her doctor. Kellogg diagnoses Will's problem as "autointoxication" and prescribes a regimen of fasting, exercise, enemas and "sinusoidal" baths (wherein an electric current is passed through the patient's body while his hands and feet are immersed in water). John Harvey Kellogg's real antagonist, though, is his adopted son, George, a 19-yearold ne'er-do-well for whose ultimate benefit and in whose ultimate interest the doctor is certain he has always acted. George is a vision of physical corruption ("teeth rotted to stubs, breath stinking like a dead thing, the miasma of his catastrophic odor enveloping him"). And this despite the efforts of Dr. Kellogg, who has raised the boy along with an ever-changing collection of adoptive siblings according to the sort of institutionalized, rigorous discipline common to the era. Dr. Kellogg has a weakness for George that springs not from affection but from a goading sense of failure; George's very existence undermines the doctor's convictions by demonstrating how emphatically his methods can backfire. George, though, is not simply a misunderstood victim. He really does stink, really commits crimes, really seeks to destroy Dr. Kellogg and the sanitarium for purely vengeful reasons. In a Boyle novel, there are major characters but no true heroes or heroines. Instead, Mr. Boyle invariably complicates and muddies the conventional play of good against evil. Even in "East Is East," in which such a protagonist does seem to appear in the form of Hiro, the Japanese sailor who only wants to find an America where he can melt into the pot, the reader's identification with this figure seems to be prohibited by his enigmatic and dogged inability to understand what is happening to him. The author himself appears far more interested in Ruth Dershowitz, an ambitious but untalented novelist who finally scores a big publishing contract to tell Hiro's story-even though the reader knows perfectly well that she doesn't understand that story at all. At first, it seems as though the hero of "The Road to Wellville" might be Charlie Ossining, an acquaintance of Will's and a future business partner of George's. Charlie is a well-meaning young entrepreneur, also from Peterskill, whose plan is to get rich with Per-Fo, a flaked cereal with a celery additive. It is soon clear that Charlie's sufferings for the sake of his fortune are to be significant. But just as George Kellogg is repellent, his father wrongheaded, Will Lightbody weak and Eleanor unfaithful, Charlie lies, cheats and steals in his effort to climb aboard the gravy train. But even as Mr. Boyle is resisting casting these characters as heroes, he seems to have mellowed in his depiction of the world they live in. Images abound of ordered, moderate well-being-represented, for example, by the presence of Dick, the Lightbodys' wire fox terrier, in the house on Parsonage Lane that Will Lightbody longs to return to. The natural world around Battle Creek is not as fallen as the landscape of "Greasy Lake & Other Stories," the Florida and Georgia swampland of "East Is East" or the early Hudson Valley of the novel "World's End." And while the "primitive" is present (Charlie boards at Mrs. Eyvindsdottir's rooming house, where the daily fare usually includes stews made of various small mammals trapped by the proprietor's beau, Bjork Bjorksson), it is on the fringes of the more inviting wholesomeness of this early-20thcentury America, where, as Will notices on a rare excursion outside the grounds of the San. "the lake gave back the sunlight m rolling flashes and sudden incendiary sparks. pushing at the shore as if testing its limns." In "The Road to Wellville." as in his previous works, Mr. Boyle evokes the world of the senses with remarkable skill. As always, his prose is a marvel, enjoyable from beginning to end, alive with astute observations. sharp intelligence and subtle musicality. Possibly as an effect of his highly developed style. Mr. Boyle's vision has been one of the most distinctive and original of his generation. "I've always written about man as an animal species among other animals. competing for limited resources," he once observed. then added, with characteristically mordant humor, "When there are too many rabbits, they all get tularemia and die off. and that's the way we're heading." In "The Road to Wellville." Mr. Boyle suggests that such a view is all the more appropriate to those, like John Harvey Kellogg, who presume to transcend. through spur,ous cleanliness and the false claims of science, both the painful and the pleasurable realities of the human-animal body. Kellogg's principal false promise is that of self-improvement, of willed change through reason. But animals don't change. and, in Mr. Boyle s view, neither does Dr. Kellogg. Will. Charlie. George or Eleanor. The most they can do. when pressed by circumstances, is reveal their eternal natures. "The Road to Wellville" is T. Coraghessan Boyle's lightest, least fierce novel. But m the end, as a reassurance to those of us who have savored the sharpness. complexity and bitterness of his previous works, the animals still bite, the fecal matter still flies and foolishness is still on ample display. |