Will Lightbody is a man with a stomach ailment whose only sin is loving his wife, Eleanor, too much. Eleanor is a health nut of the first stripe, and when in 1907 she journeys to Dr. John Harvey Kellogg's infamous Battle Creek Spa to live out the vegetarian ethos, poor Will goes too.
So begins T. Coraghessan Boyle's wickedly comic look at turn-of-the-century fanatics in search of the magic pill to prolong their lives--or the profit to be had from manufacturing it. Brimming with a Dickensian cast of characters and laced with wildly wonderful plot twists, Jane Smiley in the New York Times Book Review called The Road to Wellville "A marvel, enjoyable from beginning to end."
Jane Smiley
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...."The Road to Wellville" is T. Coraghessan Boyle's lightest, least fierce novel. But in 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. -- New York Times
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Each time out, Boyle ( World's End ; East Is East ) aims for a new target, and this time he has hit the bull's - eye. Wellville is a rich plumcake of a book, full of ripely conceived characters, satire both broad and bitter, beautifully integrated period atmosphere and writing that is colorful but considered. Set in Battle Creek, Mich., in the early years of the century, it evokes the days of C. W. Post and Will Kellogg, when fortunes were being made and lost in the national rage for the new breakfast cereals. Will's brother, John Harvey Kellogg, was an early diet devotee; to his hugely successful Battle Creek Spa came the flower of American business and society to trim their waistlines, work out and eat the kind of healthy, tasteless foods sadly recognizable to any weight watcher today. Kellogg, a showman par excellence, ran it like a small but ruthless dictatorship. Among his clients the winter of 1907, in Boyle's fictionalized account, are Will and Eleanor Lightbody, he a decent man wasting away at the urging of his fanatical wife; among the hopefuls struggling to make their names in the cereals business is engaging young ne'er-do-well Charles Ossining. How all their paths cross, how Will saves his ghastly marriage and Charles almost goes to jail but is rescued at the 11th hour and ultimately makes his pile: Boyle has woven all this into a tale told with the broad humanism and compassionate eye of a great 19th-century novelist. Truth and fiction are invisibly blended in Boyle's splendid novel, in which a loving concern for the innocent at heart touchingly prevails. 100,000 first printing; $100,000 ad/promo; film rights to Alan Parker/Beacon Pictures; first serial to Rolling Stone; author tour; BOMC selection. (May)
Library Journal
Focusing on the ``Biggest Little City in the U.S.A.,'' Boyle provides a delightfully comic anatomy of a society obsessed with miraculous cures and spectacular successes. In 1907, Battle Creek, Michigan, is a magnet for rich seekers of health and robust seekers of wealth. The former flock to John Harvey Kellogg's health spa, where the regimen requires a change in the intestinal flora via five enemas per day. The latter attempt to con their way into the booming breakfast food business. Rich with historical and imaginative details, the novel includes a romantic love story and a fierce battle between a determined father (Kellogg) and an evil son (the only one of 42 adoptive children who defies the great healer's efforts at reform). In this inventive and highly entertaining story, Boyle's proven talents are again displayed in rare form. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/93.-- Albert Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookville
School Library Journal
YA-This novel gives readers insight into the health attitudes and morals of the early 1900s. It's also a riot to read. Boyle points out the ease with which medicine was manufactured at the turn of the century, and the dangers of taking them. John Harvey Kellogg, founder of Kellogg cereals, is mercilessly portrayed as an unethical doctor who purposely misinformed his patients. He supported his outlandish claims with circus tricks that demonstrated the violent potential of eating meat. The man is also shown to have had a humanitarian side. He adopted over 52 children, many of whom went on to become successful doctors and lawyers. Another of the main characters, Will Lightbody, unwittingly becomes addicted to Sears's White Star Liquor Cure. He has a chronically upset stomach, and the tonic his physician prescribes has alcohol as the main ingredient. Will's wife, in a desperate attempt to cure his alcoholism, surreptitiously slips ``the cure'' into his evening coffee-the active ingredient being opium. And so the story continues.-Heidi M. Steinhauer, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, FL
Martha Schoolman
Near the turn of this century, when Battle Creek, Michigan, was the national seat of breakfast-cereal production, hordes of salesmen hawked breakfast stock at the city train depot. The town was the headquarters of J. 20H. Kellogg and C. W. Post, the rival magnates of cornflakes and Grape- Nuts, whose names endure to this day, as well as those whose names do not. "Wellville" is a rich, thoroughly researched social satire that provides an engaging portrait of Battle Creek from three perspectives. The first and most central is that of Dr. Kellogg himself, high priest of a sanitarium where the rich and powerful go to be cured of physical and spiritual "autointoxication" brought about by meat eating and sexual activity. Possessed of a Napoleon complex and an abiding hatred of Post, he is saluted around the clinic as "the Chief." The second is that of Will Lightbody, a patient at the clinic who has trouble getting the Kellogg religion. The third viewpoint is that of Charlie Ossining, a shady businessman who tries to get a piece of the breakfast-cereal action a little too late. Boyle is not an easy writer, but he's developed a large following among appreciators of serious literature. They will be eager to get their teeth around his latest.
Digby Diehl
A comic tour de force…Rich and delightful.
—Playboy
Kirkus Reviews
In his fifth novel (East is East, 1990, etc.), one of America's most exuberant satirists takes on the national obsession with health and nutritional fads. It's a perfect fit. Battle Creek, Michigan, 1907, breakfast-food capital of the US. C.W. Post (Grape-Nuts) and the Kellogg brothers have already made their fortunes, but there's still a gold rush atmosphere in town. The inventor of the corn flake, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, a preening martinet, now devotes himself to his Sanitarium ("luxury hotel, hospital and spa all rolled into one"), where he denounces meat-eating, enforces a five-enema-a-day regimen, and keeps his wealthy patients busy with such wacky treatments as the sinusoidal bath. Two of those patients are Will and Eleanor Lightbody of Peterskill, New York. While Eleanor talks up the San with fanatical zeal, the skeptical Will, struggling miserably with the cardboard food and fatuous pieties of his fellow-diners, is as lonely as Winston Smith in 1984. Another New York arrival, engaging young hustler Charlie Ossining, is in town to start his own breakfast- food company with partner Bender. What follows is a weave of satire and melodrama and three storylines: the lurid struggle-to-the-death between the Doctor and his outcast son George (the only one of 42 adopted kids to invalidate Kellogg's child-rearing principles); the equally melodramatic vicissitudes of Charlie; and the Lightbodys' marital drama, which climaxes when Will regains his sense of self and rescues Eleanor from the womb-manipulator Spitzvogel. Any raggedness is more than compensated for by Boyle's Dickensian eye for the grotesque and his formidable narrative power; most fittingly, for a book about the body,Boyle is one of those gloriously physical writers who can describe a simple walk on a cold night in a way that makes your blood tingle. Big, smart, exciting, and often wildly funny. (First printing of 100,000; first serial to Rolling Stone; film rights to Alan Parker)
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