Rating: 
Summary: More Butts!
Review: A satire of cornflakes and chimpanzees, "Wellville" flushes out all the waste around health, fitness, wholesome food, and other stuff your mother tried to encourage. A positively grade-school fascination with body parts and the things they do fuels this romp through the Mid-West. Salt it with some misguided radiation therapy, philandering, and the occasional misapplication of electricity, and it keeps you wondering what comes next. If you're a member at a gym, or exercise regularly, or wish you did, or laugh at those who do while snarfing potato chips, check this one out.
Rating: 
Summary: The road to what???
Review: After seeing the movie a few years ago (and thinking it was quite odd) I decided to take a shot at the book. At first it started out great and I was really interested in the storyline. The idea of 4 time a day enemas and cleansing the colon had me hooked! However then the book got going and I realized there was more to the story than the cleansing of the colon. About halfway through the book I started to get bored. I took a look at my to-be-read book pile and longed for something else. WELLVILLE did not have a plot that I could see. The book was all 'story' and very little climax. Once I finished it I was disappointed and glad for it to be over with at the same time.
Rating: 
Summary: "A steak is every bit as deadly as a gun."
Review: At the turn of the 20th century Battle Creek, Michigan was a magnet for the health-conscious while simultaneously attracting breakfast food speculators from around the country. In THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE T.C. Boyle spins an insightful and entertaining tale combining both of these historical movements. After surviving many attempts to making breakfast food products that were sabotaged by his jealous brother, he turned his attention to developing a sanitarium to launch his firm beliefs in a scientific diet that will treat the nation's ill health. After much hard work and determinism Kellogg's dream soon materialized as the sick traveled from afar to undergo daily enemas and milk diets in an effort to cleanse their systems. According to the back cover this book is "wickedly comic" and "a comic tour de force", but I felt that this book wasn't all that laugh-out-loud funny. Sure, there is a plenty of T.C. Boyle's smart and intelligent prose but rarely did I find myself giggling while reading. The only passages that made me smile included the antics of Dr. Kellogg's disobedient foster son, especially the Christmas caroling scene. All in all, I appreciated this book for its unique glimpse into this often-forgotten piece of American history; it's difficult to go wrong with T.C. Boyle as he always seems to spin an entertaining story.
Rating: 
Summary: Rubes, Idiots, Pawns, and Fools
Review: Boyle should be praised for the fluidness and the glorious imagery that saturate his prose, but the main overtones of "The Road to Wellville" seem to be anger, contempt, and sheer mockery. Contempt for his shallow, naive characters -- all dupes, pawns, rubes, and idiots, who get exploited, manipulated, tricked, cheated, and conned. 2/3 of the way into Boyle's novel, no one is happier than when the book opens -- one character (Charlie Ossining) gets scammed out of $35,000 and has stockholders waiting to kill him, another (Mr. Will Lightbody) has been brainwashed into months of celibacy and poisoned with health food (and has consented, like an idiot, to a potentially dangerous colonic operation); like a bubblehead, the lead female character (Mrs. Eleanor Lightbody) has --in an excruciating scene-- agreed to let a German doctor sexually molest her under the guise of an "experimental" treatment. It is difficult to stand all the dirty tricks Boyle plays on these characters, or the lack of self-assertion that Boyle gives them. He comes across like Michael Moore, utterly condescending and completely hypocritical. Satire, indeed. True satire (see Warren Beatty's "Bulworth") always (inevitably) proposes an alternative. Boyle's novel fails to do so and thus can only be called a mean, occasionally tasteless invective. Don't misunderstand: there are some incredibly inventive, funny, and exciting sequences in this book. But the overall attitude is off putting. We know we're in trouble when Mr. and Mrs. Lightbody (Kellogg's patients) finally share a series of intimate moments after several months of sexual abstinence; Mrs. Lightbody tells her husband erotically, "Give me a daughter," and Boyle has some moronic staff person from the Sanitarium burst into the room and initiate coitus interruptus. During moments like this, when we feel the disappointment in our gut, we may realize just how careless Boyle is with his tone. As for historical detail and sheer breadth, T. Coraghessan Boyle's work can't even touch Pynchon. Consider forgetting "Wellville" and going straight for "Gravity's Rainbow" instead. It is a far more interesting, farther-reaching, and infinitely funnier novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Historically Incorrect
Review: First off, the author as well as other reviewer mention that Kellogg is the inventor of peanut butter. This is incorrect. Its actually George Washington Carver that invented peanut butter as well as over 200 uses for the peanut. Kellogg did not invent peanut butter, but may have advocated its use as a protien substitute instead of eating meat or any type of animal flesh. As for my review. I found Boyle's take on the post-victorian era health fad to be entertaining. I was facinated by the ignorance of health issues back in 1907 as well as the plethora of "snake oil" salesmen, Kellogg included, who tried to petal some of the most ridiculous cures for the most common malaise. All symptoms of aches and pains were diagnosed by Kellogg as "autointoxication of this" or "autointoxication of that" This and that being eating of meat or drinking of alcohol. Its a marvel that so many people were eager to put their lives in the hands of people who were in no way, shape, or form trained in the medical profession. A scary journey into the birth of the health and nutrition era.
Rating:
Summary: Near Perfect Crazy and Corny HealthFood Odyssey!
Review: First, TC Boyle has to be about the funniest, and most laughably bizarre authors out there. This account of the beginnings of a true American turn of the last century business success is as jumpy as some of the popping cereal that we consume today, over a century later. It is also a nifty time travel with all the inventions, crackpots, and quackeries so prevalent then. And the people are just as quirky. My only complaint is the scatological parts, mainly at the end, but if you don't mind that, then pick up this book for fun and laughs you'll remember years after you read this! (And I read it about 7 years ago!)
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Summary: Guaranteed to QUACK you up!
Review: How does T.C. Boyle find these obscure figures from history and bring such life to them? John Harvey Kellogg of cereal fame certainly ranks as one of the oddball physicians of all time. At Battle Creek, Michigan, birthplace of the Corn Flake, Dr. Kellogg ran a health-nut hotel known as the "San" in the era of Henry Ford and Upton Sinclair, (both of whom were patients of the place.) Kellogg's predilection for his new "biologic living" meant strange meatless diets for his patients, regimens of heavy breathing, regular doses of electricity and radium, strict celibacy, and above all, thoroughly cleansed bowels. The Battle Creek Sanitarium -- you can look it up -- it was real. Alone, this boggles the mind. Then our author begins his fiction.
Into this peculiar environment, Boyle drops Mr. & Mrs. William Lightbody of Peterskill, NY as patients of the San; Charlie Ossining, President-in-Chief of a startup breakfast cereal firm; George Kellogg, malcontent son of the famed sanitarium director; Goodloe H. Bender, a free spending business promoter; and a host of assorted iconoclast physicians and malady stricken patients. Colorful characters all. Over the course of 476 pages, we are acquainted intimately with the diets, regimens and other prescriptions assigned the patients of the San. We follow the ups and downs (and deaths!) of these patients, as well as that of the Per-Fo (short for Perfect Food - "It Makes Active Blood!") Company run by Ossining and Bender.
TRTW is a cover-to-cover grin, a farcical look back at a slice in time starring the conniving, the gullible and the deluded. If you can procure the hardcopy version, you'll enjoy the accompanying period photographs of questionable medical practices prevalent at the San.
Rating:
Summary: Literature
Review: I actually like the movie, but I was floored by the book. Darker and more sinister in tone than the movie, it is also immensly richer. I know that goes in just about every case, but it's especially true here. With this book, I've discovered a contemporary writer who writes not just fiction, but ... dare I say it? ... Literature!
Rating:
Summary: What If Fiction!
Review: I believe the author of the Road to Wellville would have accomplished a lot more if he had written a historical, instead of a fictional account of the BattleCreek Sanitarium. Dr. Kellogg did not DIE at age seventy of a heart attack, but lived until 1943 and died at the age of 91 years. having been born in 1852.
Rating:
Summary: Dickension - If Dickens Had A Wicked Streak
Review: I don't know if this is Boyle's best novel, but it's the one I've enjoyed the most. I think the reviewer who called it Dickension is right--and I think that Boyle has consciously immitated Dickens' style in his historical fiction. The sprawling plot, the larger-than-life characters--all remind me of Dickens. But what Boyle does with this material is certainly un-Dickension. No, smarmy melodramas wrapped up with felicitous coincidences here! Actually, Boyle reminds me a bit of John Irving--also a conscious immitator of Dickens. If you like John Irving's novels and you don't mind a bit of wickedness--well, more than a bit, really, then you might like THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE. This may also be Boyle's most readable novel. Although his style is engaging in all of the stuff I've read by him, this novel probably requires the least of his readers--I loved WATER MUSIC as well, but some my find that one a bit more perplexing.
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