The Road to Wellville (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

The time is 1907-1908. The once sickly, now robust Teddy Roosevelt is in the White House and Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of peanut butter and the corn flake, is in charge of “the Battle Creek Sanitarium, bastion of right thinking, vegetarianism and self-improvement, citadel of temperance and dress reform, and, not coincidentally, the single healthiest spot on the planet.” The whole country appears to be on “The Road to Wellville,” to borrow a phrase coined by one of Kellogg’s former “guests,” more recently one of his most successful competitors, C. W. Post.

That road is, however, curiously dual. Its travelers include those who, like Kellogg, have made physical culture into a religion (his “temple of health” was originally a boarding house run by Seventh Day Adventists whom the messianic scientist-showman Kellogg subsequently squeezed out). Such institutions cater to the well-to-do, those who are well able to afford “nature” in its latest and most scientifically disciplined form. Then there are the other travelers, like Charles Ossining, humbly born and engagingly as well as comically naive, who hopes to cash in on the health-food fad by cooking up a variation on Kellogg’s corn-flake theme.

Boyle’s Ph.D. in the nineteenth century novel has served him well throughout his career, best perhaps, in the novel WATER MUSIC, the short story collection THE DESCENT OF MAN, and now again in THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE, which reads like a remake of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s THE GILDED AGE for the slightly later Progressive Era, aka the Age of Reform. Densely packed with period details, THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE is an exuberantly satiric carnival of verbal delights and comic plotting whose target proves no less dual than the road to Wellville itself. Battle Creek at the beginning of the twentieth century curiously reflects America at the end with the well-intentioned but dictatorial Dr. Kellogg as forerunner of today’s televangelists and no less messianic self-help specialists, fitness experts, advertisers, and other hucksters of various new world orders, political correctness included.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. LXXXIX, March 15, 1993, p.1274.

Cohen, Robert. Review of The Road to Wellville. Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 30, 1993, 2.

Kirkus Reviews. LXI, February 1, 1993, p.75.

Library Journal. CXVIII, March 15, 1993, p.104.

Marx, Bill. Review of The Road to Wellville. The Washington Post Book World, May 9, 1993, 5.

The New Republic. CCIX, October 4, 1993, p.43.

Newsweek. CXXI, April 19, 1993, p.62.

Publishers Weekly. CCXL, February 22, 1993, p.79.

Smiley, Jane. Review of The Road to Wellville. The New York Times Book Review, April 25, 1993, 1.

Time. CXLI, May 10, 1993, p.71.