Good intentions

The Road to Wellville - T. Coraghessan Boyle (Penguin Books, 1993)

I have a fairly sensitive digestive tract, so the idea of a whole novel dedicated to Kellogg's Sanitarium, where the wealthy went to be indoctrinated with vegetarian ideals and all manners of enemas and the like.... well, it didn't strike me as the best plan.

But T.C. Boyle is a pleasure, and so I survived the icky parts that made me uncomfortable. Here we go -- we're at the turn of the last century, when Kellogg and Post and the like were making up new cereals and pills and everyone was a health nut looking for the key to living healthfully (and forever). Sound familiar? [Actually, one of the funniest things to me about reading this was how half of Kellogg's meals had major amounts of gluten.]

John Harvey Kellogg is a major character, as self-righteous and awful as you'd probably expect. Will Lightbody is one of his patients, dragged to the Sanitarium by his wife, who throws herself wholeheartedly into whatever quack strikes her fancy. Charles Ossining has also come to Michigan to make his fortune in the health industry, except he finds that staying afloat in a glutted market is more difficult than he may have imagined.

And the games begin. A whole feast of minor (and mid-major) characters flood the stage, and an awful lot happens in a year. And each character appears on a roller coaster of ups and downs, suffering wild setbacks and imagining massive victories. Which is particularly exciting, since they are essentially all working at odds.

On a side note, was struck by Goodloe Bender, the confidence man. It is probably coincidence that he shares a last name with Ilf & Petrov's Ostap Bender, the comic con man of the early Soviet era. But I thought of him throughout. And since I've also been working on a project to organize my Russian books, now I want more than ever to go back and see that Bender in action.