The Road to Wellville

by T. C. Boyle

Overview

In this “wildly funny” (People) novel, an eccentric cast of characters navigates a world obsessed with health and longevity—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Tortilla Curtain.
 
“Boyle’s send-up of dietary fanaticism cleverly reminds us of the extremes to which Americans will go in pursuit of perfection.”—Glamour
 
The year is 1907, and the boom town of Battle Creek, Michigan, is attracting a formidable array of visitors—the rich, the preposterously rich, and the merely famous, from California, Chicago, New York, and even Europe. What draws them to this place? And what inspires them to trade in their steaks and oysters, their martinis and champagne, for a diet of bran and yogurt and a regimen of five enemas a day? Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, of course, inventor of the corn flake, peanut butter, and the coffee substitutes that have ruined so many a bright morning.
 
Will Lightbody is a man with an undiagnosed stomach ailment whose only sin is loving his wife too much. Eleanor Lightbody, despite her upper-crust credentials, her capability and beauty, is a health nut of the first stripe—and when she journeys to Dr. Kellogg’s infamous Battle Creek Spa to live out the vegetarian ethos, poor Will goes too.
 
Wickedly comedic, The Road to Wellville overflows with a Dickensian cast of characters—all in search of the magic pill to prolong their lives, or the profit to be had from manufacturing it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140167184
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/01/1994
Edition description:	New
Pages:	496
Sales rank:	248,159
Product dimensions:	5.13(w) x 7.67(h) x 1.06(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

T. C. Boyle is a novelist and regular contributor to The New Yorker. His novels include World’s End and The Tortilla Curtain, and he has also published numerous collections of short stories. A Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Southern California, he lives in Santa Barbara.

Hometown:

Santa Barbara California

Date of Birth:

December 2, 1948

Place of Birth:

Peekskill, New York

Education:

B.A. in music, State University of New York at Potsdam, 1970; Ph.D. in literature, Iowa University, 1977

Website:

http://www.tcboyle.com/

Editorial Reviews

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

Jane Smiley

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)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

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

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

School Library Journal

A comic tour de force…Rich and delightful.
—Playboy

Digby Diehl

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)

Kirkus Reviews