THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE

By T. Coraghessan Boyle
Viking (1993)

T. Coraghessan Boyle's "The Road To Wellville" is in direct descent from those turn-of-the-century cartoons about pompous, top-hatted bankers slipping and bumping their asses on a patch of sidewalk ice. Though they knew it was wrong to take comfort in other people's pain, folks laughed at those old cartoons because, after all, they were pompous, top-hatted bankers.

In "Wellville", Boyle has taken a wit that is stiletto-sharp and merciless as an assassin and aimed it at just the right set of targets: arrogant doctors, the idle rich, and con-men. He has created a world of wholly engaging characters, but no heroes or heroines. Their common denominator...besides the fact that they all end up in Battle Creek, Michigan, just after the turn of the century...is that they profoundly believe. Some believe so passionately in themselves and their own abilities that they think they can pull off any scheme they set their minds to. Some believe so passionately in the infallibility of others that they fall for any scheme. Suckers and those who suck on them.

The central figure in "Wellville" is Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of the corn flake and the founding father of America's physical health movement. Around the turn of the century, Kellogg took over a spa in Battle Creek, Michigan, and built it into a citadel of health to which the rich and famous of that time did pilgrimage. Boyle describes him as what you imagine a misdirected Thomas Alva Edison might be if he were injected with a strain of Oral Roberts. Despite misdiagnoses, experimentation and outright quackery that leads, among other things, to the deaths of several patients and the lifelong enmity of his adopted son, Kellogg has complete faith in his ability to rebuild people into "physiologically-correct" beings. That faith is shared by most of his patients and staff alike. "When I think of what he's done for mankind--for the alimentary canal alone--," one of his nurses gushes, "I have to say, yes, he is a God, my God, and he should be yours, too."

But though Kellogg is the lamp about which the moths of this book flutter, the main characters are actually Will Lightbody and Charlie Ossining, two products of the affluent society of Peterskill, New York, who intersect in Battle Creek. Lightbody is the heir to an industrial fortune, almost stereotypically introverted, an Ichabod Cranish-character whose life's sole passion is his love and devotion for a vain, pampered, and self-centered wife. Ossining is a confidence man, a hustler, a child of poverty who had the great luck early in life to be semi-adopted by a wealthy woman and who has played the hand of that good fortune ever since. Lightbody comes to Kellogg's Battle Creek Sanitarium at the behest of his wife, hoping to find a cure for the most godawful stomach ailment you have ever heard of. Ossining comes to make his fortune from a new cereal company created to compete with Kellogg's Cornflakes.

In Boyle's hands, none of the characters get much sympathy. When sanitarium patients wonder at their gradual hair loss after basking in the warmth of the "healing stone" of a piece of raw uranium--or when doctors get caught masturbating their female patients while passing it off as "manipulation of the womb" therapy ("because this is the seat of the hysterical passions in the female anatomy and the key, many feel, to neurasthenic disorders")--or when a hustler himself gets hustled and then caught in the most ingenious and embarrassing of traps--we are allowed to laugh in good conscience at the sufferers. Everybody here deserves what they get.

The book is well-crafted and appears to benefit from extensive research (I hope, for Boyle's sake, that it is accurate; if not, he's in for some particularly nasty cross-examination by the Kellogg family attorneys). Boyle is an excellent story teller, drawing the plotline out like a string on a wallet so that the reader must scurry along to try to catch up with it. One of his strong points is the ability to create the most outrageous of comic situations and then to abruptly end the scene, allowing the reader to figure out the result. Some may find that annoying; I thought he was giving his readers credit for a little intelligence and a rare chance to use our imaginations. But no matter how fine a mess his characters get in, Boyle serves it all up in deadpan delivery, never cracking a narrative smile. The combination works. This is a funny, funny book, not what you want to read on public transport if you don't like to embarrass yourself by laughing out loud.

Boyle has managed another good accomplishment: recreating what you would think life in the Victorian-era midwest actually felt like. Here and there, the characters drop casual references to Red Indians, minstrel shows, and runaway slaves in a way that suggests a time when racism did not have the moral stigma that is now attached. Will Lightbody's many sexual fantasies (about his wife, about his nurse, about other patients) are filtered through the intense sexual repression of the era. Kellogg himself displays an absolute horror of sexual intercourse, forbidding its practice among his patients, chastising Lightbody when he's caught after hours in his wife's room at the sanitarium or when the poor man buys a mail order electrically-charged belt to combat his impotence. When a smart-ass at a sanitarium assembly remarks that by these practices, the good doctor seems to be advocating extinction for the race ("If sexual connection is to be avoided at all cost, even within the bonds of marriage," he says, "then what hope is there for us, outside of virgin birth?"), Kellogg replies that "as a scientist, I hardly find (virgin birth) feasible...but as a moralist and physician, I couldn't wish for anything more." If his audience doesn't buy the argument, they offer no challenge.

"Wellville" falters in only two places.

The first is in the ending. For a book that relies so heavily and so successfully on wry remarks out of the corners of its mouth, an ending that cavorts about like P.T. Barnum's circus or the third reel of a Marx Brothers movie seems way out of character. Most readers will be able to suggest several other ways that all the various threads could have been tied up, and you wonder what was going through Boyle's mind to cause him to slip so badly at the end after writing so good a book.

The book's second hitch is in the character of George, Kellogg's bummy adopted son. Like the heroes in those old movie serials, George shows up in all the right places at just the right times to move the plot along, and Boyle's use of coincidence here mars an otherwise well-crafted story line. Perhaps Boyle has some sort of symbolic demonic role for George...the devil child who returns from hell with supernatural powers to torment his father. If so, it seems out of place in a novel that purports to be historically accurate. Unless you believe in demons.

Those small points aside, "The Road To Wellville" lives up to the reputation of eclectic, eccentric excellence T. Coraghessan has been establishing for himself.