Rating: 
Summary: Laughfest...
Review: To read a novel and be interupted by your own fits of laughter means a good read to me.
The Road to Wellville is one of the funniest novels I have had the pleasure of enjoying.
T C Boyle is brilliant. This author does the math, I mean the research...then spins his creative magic into pure gold.
I find myself thinking about his made up characters blended with the real characters in The Road to Wellville thinking they are ALL the real deal, the sign of success in the fictional world.
As a recent fan of Boyle's darkly humorous work I already know I won't ever be able to get enough of the stuff...keep 'em coming TC!
Rating: 
Summary: "Charlie Ossining was late."
Review: We always understand books or films in the context of our lives. For me, that quote -- describing Charlie Ossining's first moments in Battle Creek, as he realizes that he's at the tail-end and not the forefront of the breakfast-cereal boom -- sum up my experience of the book.As an underling and long-time observer of The New Economy, I literally woke inspired one day to seek out this book. Though published in 1993, prior to the 'internet boom', it could as easily be a pointed parody of gullible dot-com fetishism and market-cap charlatanism as of gullible '80s materialism (or gullible '70s self-obsession or gullible '60s self-centeredness or... well, you get the idea). And the sense of deja-vu-all-over-again is only intensified by having once personally lived through Charlie's experience as the unwitting accomplice in a Big Con. It's worth mentioning Boyle's apparent affection for even his most questionable characters. Even the 'little doctor', JH Kellog himself, is drawn as a man with the best and most genuine of motives, albeit a sad lack of self-examination. Scathingly satirical, funny, occasionally (but only so) gross and nasty, it's nevertheless never mean-spirited -- and that's why it works.
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