Adventures In Food Fear

By John Skow

TITLE: THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE

AUTHOR: T. CORAGHESSAN BOYLE

PUBLISHER: VIKING; 476 PAGES; $22.50

THE BOTTOM LINE: For reasons not clear, the author amusingly satirizes rich health faddists at a turn-of-the-century spa.

Novelist T. Coraghessan Boyle (Water Music, World's End) is a writer of prose that is very stylish indeed, though the thought wafts through a doubter's mind that he has not yet written anything quite as splendid as his own name, which like his paragraphs he parts nattily on the left. Boyle's flaw in his past work has been to seem a bit precious and self-pleased. His new novel is one of his better efforts, though effort is the key word here, and the result is, at best, a story that is amusing and interestingly odd but baffling in its intent.

The author has resurrected a historical figure, John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of cornflakes and founder of a spa for health faddists that he ran at Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1907 and 1908. As Boyle caricatures him, Kellogg was half charlatan and half believing zealot, an early whooper-up of overnourished America's chronic food fear. Rigid vegetarianism, fasting, sexual abstinence and abdominal massage were among his nostrums. But his favorite was "colonic irrigation" -- enemas administered as often as five times a day.

Kellogg's sanitarium catered mostly, as such places do, to wealthy nitwits who have convinced themselves that they are ill. Boyle gives us, among many others, Will and Eleanor Lightbody, a vacuously neurasthenic couple from upstate New York. She is idle and decorative, the kind of woman who latches on to gurus. He is weak and silly, dazed from the regimen of opiates and alcohol she has administered to him as "tonics." The therapeutic tortures Will endures are grotesque, but the novel's direction is predictable, and all that the story must resolve is how long it takes Will to gather his meager wits and clear out. Loosely related subplots, thrown in to keep matters churning, deal with the efforts of a couple of con men to get rich in the cereal business and of Kellogg's bitter adopted son to take well-justified vengeance on the great doctor.

This is not just comedy, it is caustic satire, and that is what is puzzling. The pomposities of wealthy mid-Americans in 1907 are long dead and undefended. Health faddists are still abundant and deserving of mockery, but they wear Lycra now, and their spas offer aromatherapy, Nautilus machines and biofeedback. They won't recognize themselves in Boyle's mirror. The author's characters are self-evidently foolish -- the case does not need 476 pages of proving -- and so two-dimensional that there is no question of caring about them as if they had real blood and real pain. Which leaves a reader of Boyle's cheerful and inoffensive tale asking the deadliest of questions: So what?