The Road to Wellville - Softcover

T-coraghessan-boyle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140140751 ISBN 13: 9780140140750

Publisher: Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 1995

Synopsis

The acclaimed author of World's End and East Is East explores a uniquely American obsession in his newest and best novel yet. Centering on John Harvey Kellogg and his Battle Creek Spa, this novel is rich with Dickensian characters and fascinating historical detail.

About this title

About the Author:

T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE was born and raised in New York's Hudson Valley and now lives near Los Angeles. He is the author of several novels and short story collections. His 1987 novel, World's End, won the PENlFaulkner Award.

From Kirkus Reviews:

In his fifth novel (East is East, 1990, etc.), one of America's most exuberant satirists takes on the national obsession with health and nutritional fads. It's a perfect fit. Battle Creek, Michigan, 1907, breakfast-food capital of the US. C.W. Post (Grape-Nuts) and the Kellogg brothers have already made their fortunes, but there's still a gold rush atmosphere in town. The inventor of the corn flake, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, a preening martinet, now devotes himself to his Sanitarium (``luxury hotel, hospital and spa all rolled into one''), where he denounces meat-eating, enforces a five-enema-a-day regimen, and keeps his wealthy patients busy with such wacky treatments as the sinusoidal bath. Two of those patients are Will and Eleanor Lightbody of Peterskill, New York. While Eleanor talks up the San with fanatical zeal, the skeptical Will, struggling miserably with the cardboard food and fatuous pieties of his fellow-diners, is as lonely as Winston Smith in 1984. Another New York arrival, engaging young hustler Charlie Ossining, is in town to start his own breakfast- food company with partner Bender. What follows is a weave of satire and melodrama and three storylines: the lurid struggle-to-the-death between the Doctor and his outcast son George (the only one of 42 adopted kids to invalidate Kellogg's child-rearing principles); the equally melodramatic vicissitudes of Charlie; and the Lightbodys' marital drama, which climaxes when Will regains his sense of self and rescues Eleanor from the womb-manipulator Spitzvogel. Any raggedness is more than compensated for by Boyle's Dickensian eye for the grotesque and his formidable narrative power; most fittingly, for a book about the body, Boyle is one of those gloriously physical writers who can describe a simple walk on a cold night in a way that makes your blood tingle. Big, smart, exciting, and often wildly funny. (First printing of 100,000; first serial to Rolling Stone; film rights to Alan Parker) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books Australia Ltd
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0140140751
• ISBN 13: 9780140140750
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 476