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Summary: A Dickensian-style novel too good to put down
Review: The amazing thing about this book is how well Mr. Boyle writes. He propels the reader from scene to scene with rarely a dull moment. Although the book does suffer from the elephantitis that afflicts most best sellers (especially surprising given the slimness of the plot) the story propels itself along like a runaway locomotive.This is a wonderful book and a highly enjoyable read.
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Summary: If Dickens Were a Smartass
Review: The jovial tone of this dark and wicked novel is winning. This is a wonderful read and very very funny. The comic style and the high jinks are tempered by the dark and ernst illumination of our contemporary non-smoking non-fat health craze, but my god, who knew it'd be so facinating and weird and true? If you liked the movie, this is ten times better. If you didn't, it's a hundred times better. Bizarre and always entertaing, Boyle is one of our greatest living authors.
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Summary: The American Dream
Review: The main plot of the Road to Wellville focuses on physiologic living - perfect physical health. But there's more to the book than that. Charlie Ossining is in search of the American Dream of business success. Mr. Lightbody is in search of the perfect love, whether with his wife or his nurse. George Kellogg is obsessed with revenge. Dr. Kellogg is trying to preserve his reputation and fame. These are all things many of us seek today. When Boyle pokes gentle, and not-so-gentle, fun at his characters, he is poking fun at us. The novel is well-paced, moving fairly smoothly from one set of characters to another. There are lots of people with varying degrees of importance to the story, and sometimes it is hard to keep track of every plot twist. Overall, however, most readers should be able to find at least one person to take an interest in.
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Summary: The Evils of kinked colons. The benifits of Organic Grace.
Review: The Road to Wellville is an amusing story of people in search of Organic Grace. These people believe that they suffer from the visceral accumulation of toxic sludge brought on by years of improper diet. Since the rigors of eating were never mastered better than by the great Cleansed Colon himself, Dr. Kellogg, they follow his ever command. They scour their colons, blast out their bowels, purge their way to purity--yet, despite the daily intrusions to their lower orifices', they still end up digging their own graves with their teeth. Told with unrelenting satire, The Road to Wellville is the story of an original Health Nut and all his pampered followers. Provides great insights into the Fad that still drains wallets today.
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Summary: Hilarious satire with a timely message
Review: The Road to Wellville is going on my list of absolute favourite books. This is one of the funniest novels I have ever read, and also one of the most educational. T. Coraghessan Boyle has perfected the art of understatement. One of my favourite parts is when Eleanor Lightbody is receiving her German therapeutic massage: "She sank beneath it, dreaming of those sylvan glades, of men and women alike gamboling through Bavarian meadows, as naked as God made them, and she felt herself moving, too, the gentlest friction of her hips against the leather padding, moving forward and downwards and ever so therapeutically into that firm sure touch." Trust me, when you get to that part of the book, all will make sense in a most delightful way! This is a chronicle of the scatological misadventures of the spa/health set of the 1890s/1900s. Why do I say scatological? Well, John Kellogg (inventor of corn flakes and peanut butter) was obsessed with the alimentary canal. He believed a strict regimen of no fewer than five enemas per day was necessary for good health. His obsession with defecatory health permeates the novel and gives it its own unique...er...flavour. But the novel is not a coprocentric treatise. It is a hilarious, rollicking journey through the life of a quack who didn't know he was a quack, and through the lives of those he effected. I was first introduced to this tale through the critically-panned film version (which I personally enjoyed very much!). The book shares many common plot elements with the story, but, as is the usual case, is far superior to its film adaptation. It is also a very quick and easy read. It's easy to disassociate myself from the ridiculous treatments included in this book (breathing in radium as a means of treating jaundice is a perfect example), but, I can't help but think T. Coraghessan Boyle may have meant this book to serve also as a cautionary tale. Sure, it's fun to laugh at those silly people of a hundred years ago, but similarly ridiculous and life-threatening "treatments" are being given out now under the guise of holistic healing.
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Summary: Great historic novel on the health movement in the US
Review: The Road to Wellville takes the reader to Battle Creek Michigan at the beginning of the 20th century, a place and time where the modern health food and breakfast food industries were born. Two men arrive on a train and we follow their experiences in Battle Creek. Will Lightbody arrives with his wife Eleanor to go to the famous Sanitorium run by John Harvey Kellogg seeking a cure to his digestive problems. Charlie Ossining wants to make it rich quick in the breakfast cereal industry started by Dr. Kellogg's brother William and his competitor C. W. Post.
Although the novel is written in the third person, the reader sees the story evolve through the perspective of these two men. Other characters suffer from this approach, especially the women like Eleanor Lightbody, whom Will and Charlie never seem to understand.
The novel differs from the movie, which remains true to the plot and characterization, in that the novel portrays the inner longings and motivations of these two men, while the movie stresses the visual aspects of what they see and do. This makes the movie both funnier and a bit more removed than the novel.
The historicity of the book is well developed. Most of the people, places and events can be confirmed from the record. This is a great book to read if one is interested in healthy living and wants to know the background of today's health movement.
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Summary: amusing fanatics
Review: There is something inherently amusing in any sort of fanaticism, at least until folks start getting hurt, which they almost always do. Manias and fads, by definition, lead folks to engage in behavior that looks nearly insane to the impartial observer. Meanwhile, America, for myriad reasons, has always provided fertile ground for self-improvement crazes. Perhaps the simple fact that democracy and capitalism offer people so much freedom to define themselves and opportunity to mold their own destinies just inevitably carries with it a darker flip-side in this heightened susceptibility to irrational and dubious schemes. Whatever the cause, T. Corraghessan Boyle takes glorious advantage of this national tendency in The Road to Wellville and renders a brutally funny portrait of the health food quacks and con artists of Battle Creek, Michigan. Is there a kid with soul so dead that his heart doesn't start pumping a little bit faster when he hears that magical name?: Battle Creek, Michigan. I know when I was a kid, I so loved breakfast cereal that I ate it, to my Grandmother's abiding horror, out of a dog bowl, so that I could get a sufficiently Brobdignagian portion. And it can't be true, but in memories of childhood it certainly seems like every single on of those cereals was made in Battle Creek and somewhere they must have had a huge repository of knick knacks, gew gaws and various other cheesy toys, because that's always where you had to send away for them. Well, unbeknownst to those of us who hoovered down Lucky Charms and Cap'n Crunch and Sugar Smacks and the like, the original breakfast cereals were the product of men like C.W. Post and Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and they were part of a health fad. Apparently they weren't originally intended to deliver massive amounts of sugar and cheap toys to growing boys. Nor were men like Kellogg simply concerned with getting some grains into people's diets. In fact, he ran an enormous luxurious Sanitarium where wealthy patrons would come to cleanse themselves via meat-free diets, enemas five times a day and a whole battery of other wacky treatments and inspirational harangues from Kellogg. Boyle takes this potent comic setting, made up of equal parts holiness and hucksterism, and sets up several storylines which all converge at the San. There's a confrontation between Kellogg and a wayward adopted son, the only one of his 40+ adoptees to rebel against Kellogg's bizarre health regimen. There's an increasingly troubled young married couple, Will and Eleanor Lightbody, troubled because she has bought into Kellogg's theories with gusto, while he loathes the regimentation and tasteless diet. Then there's Charlie Ossining, a young man on the make who just wants a piece of the cereal business and his own share of the American Dream. Boyle gets in his fair share of gratuitous shots and slapstick gags, but there's a broader point that gets driven home along the way. For all of these characters utter self-absorption and the folly of their attempt to sort of re-engineer themselves, in the end they can not escape their essential humanness, their mortality, their physical and mental vulnerability and the ultimate spiritual emptiness of Kellogg's slogans. In the final scenes of the novel each character is reintroduced, abruptly, even violently, to the messy reality of the outside world. Kellogg's Spa is exposed as a kind of Potemkin Village, presenting a facade of health which masks the deep unhappiness and essentially unhealthy lives of it's residents. It's interesting that Boyle made this a historical rather than a contemporary novel; it sort of has the feel of an E. L. Doctorow to it. Perhaps he was merely seeking Doctorowesque sales, and, indeed, the book was his most successful and was made into a big budget movie, which is supposedly awful. But the stories and themes would work just as well if the novel were set in current society. Dupes are still out there looking for that quick fix and sharpies are still out there getting rich off of their delusions. One hardly knows whether to be reassured or depressed at the basic intransigence of human nature. GRADE: B+
Rating: 
Summary: Medicine or snake-oil??
Review: This book provides a fair amount of food for thought. While the treatments described here look like quackery now, at the time they were at least as acceptable as some modern therapies at the edges of the mainstream. You have to try to look at things from the perspective of the period to understand the characters better. Another interesting point is the difficulty distinguishing between those that actually believe in these treatments and the snake-oil salesmen who are simply out to get rich using the latest "medical advances." Makes you wonder about some of the current ads you see for new drugs, therapies, or treatments....
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Summary: More people should read Mr. Boyle's work
Review: This novel should be required reading for anyone who is close to someone who believes in "natural health" products. Americans seem particularly vulnerable to these gullible searches for 'perfect health'--whatever that is. Check your newspaper for the latest FDA recommendations and wipe that soy milk off your upper lip. Times haven't changed much from the heyday of Mr. Kellogg and his weird science. The funny part is that folks are _still_running around touting everything from pond scum and surfactants as miracle cures. Decades after Kellogg's wacky "treatments" there are scads of people who spend thousands of dollars on algae and pressed bark and fungus tea as they wax rhapsodic about molecules and colon health. (Usually with all the depth and understanding of an eighth grader in Human Health class.) It's funny, yeah, and pathetic at the same time. Just one of the little underbellies of our modern society. Boyle is an extraordinarily entertaining and literate writer, and his fiction is an absolute delight to read. My 65-year-old father (who mostly reads Westerns) gave me a book of Boyle's short stories for Christmas. "You've gotta read this," he said. "It's great." He had no idea I've been reading T.C. for years. I think one of the reasons people like this guy so much is because they feel like they "discovered" him personally--for some reason, his name doesn't seem to be as household as some of the other big writers. It's not because he doesn't deserve it or because he hasn't written enough. If you're unsure, get a book from the library first--his short stories are a good place to wet your whistle. And search Amazon for reviews on his other great books._The Road to Wellville_is a great riff on a squirrley part of American history that hasn't failed to teach us much. It's a hoot, and an absolute tonic for those of us who feel a bit disgusted at the thought of taking colostrum pills or whatever the fad is this week.
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Summary: Very entertaining, but no match for "The Tortilla Curtain"
Review: Though nowhere near as profound as Boyle's magnum opus, The Tortilla Curtain, The Road to Wellville is an extremely entertaining novel with an unclear message. As best I can tell, the book is an indictment of orthodoxy and charlatanism, perhaps equating the 2 to the pitfalls of religious dogma.
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